Amidst all of the excellent discussion this past week on Moore's poem, I failed to find an answer to the one question that intrigued me the most, i.e., should an artist be allowed to change his or her work?

Ultimately, an artist is allowed to do anything she wants. There have been artists who burned or destroyed their work. There have been artists who revisited works. I believe that generally this revisiting results in a sort of fussiness that smothers any initial spontaneity. I'm thankful Michelangelo worked in marble when he created David and endured agonizing aches and pains when painting the Sistine Chapel ... at least it meant he was less tempted to go back and fiddle with his finished works.

Is there a personality trait that makes someone more likely to play with their work? (Pre-publication playing doesn't count in this case, since it is publication that would define permanence for a poem.) For instance, is it an obsessive-compulsive trait? Is it a facet of perfectionism? Is it insecurity?

On the other hand, perhaps it is in an artist's own best interests to edit while she can. The current news about Hemingway's 'The Moveable Feast" (<link>) is rather distressing. The book was allegedly published in a way that Hemingway would not have wanted, but his last wife was in charge of putting together the first edition. And now Hemingway's grandson, son of one of Hemingway's earlier wives, is putting out his own version, to paint his mother in a kinder light. Is the book really a work of Hemingway's now? Has it ever been?

I'm wondering whether this posthumous editing should be allowed. I realize a good counter-argument to this is that a later, scholarly and carefully researched edition (a la Emily Dickinson) may turn out to be the definitive one. But what about a grandson defending his grandmother's reputation? Is that a legitimate reason for a new version?

It would be harder, perhaps, for me to make the anti-revisiting argument were it not for the fact that in Moore's case I feel the original was definitely the better version.

<link>

Possibly one of the most famous paintings of all times. One a King loved so much that he created a whole Museum just to house her captivating smile. Yet, it was a work which even Leonardo never considerd finished - and which he kept for himself so that he could constantly change and improve upon it.

I guess that answers the question well enough for me.

d;-)

Thanks IT for the inspiration -

That Mona Lisa Smile


Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep
They just lie there, and they die there
Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art ?

They stood in line for hours, waitng
for one quick glimse of the lady
her haunting smile, eternal
older than the rocks among which she sits

Not unlike the face that
launched a thousand ships
this smile that so intrigued a king
he should devote his life to beauty

This subtle conflict between
curiosity and human desire
raising questions more important
then even the answers

If curiosity killed the cat
then the cat died nobly indeed
that he should contemplate
the mysteries of eternity

Let me seize the moment
raised by the excited curiosity
the wick in the candle of knowledge
that lights the pathway of life

So smile, Mona Lisa, smile
as you gaze peacefully across eternity
where curiosity is lying in wait
to reveal its every secret.

d;-)

IT, as I said to poet John Canaday in another thread, poets might want to make sure they are the ones who edit their own Complete Works before they die, lest someone else do the task in a manner not to their liking.

But even so, Things Happen. Just a couple of years ago, someone got hold of Elizabeth Bishop's notes and published her previously-unpublished poems. Considering how particular Bishop was about her poetry (publshed just over 100 in her lifetime, I think), many felt that was a sacrilige, while others thought it opened a new way of understanding Bishop.

Likewise, in 1955, someone published every last one of Dickinson's poems, jottings on the back of a shopping list, poems-in-letters, etc. and called all of them poems. Dickinson herself chose only certain of her poems to bind into her fascicles.

I think one problem with revising a poem later in life is the question of whom the poem "belongs" to at that point. If the public has grown to love a certain version of a poem, does the author have the right to pull the carpet out from under their feet with a new version?

Plus, if a scholar is later interested in reading all of someone's poems in order to understand the arc of his/her progression as a poet, doesn't the arc get muddied if the poet revises in 2009 a poem originally written in 1950?

For a while, I was a big fan of the poetry of Dave Smith, who now heads the Hopkins Writing Seminars. I devoured every line of every poem of his in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. A few years later, he came out with a Collected Works and I bought it. Some lines from the earlier devoured poems were different. I could see why he changed them, but perhaps he was hoping not many people would notice. And I do think there were perhaps 8 of us who noticed.

: - )

PS -- there were 3 versions of Moore's poem. The one you like, the 1924 one, was the second version.

But who has the authority to allow or prohibit? Just as any work of art, once put out in public, can't be taken back, any revision an artist makes, or any edition an editor offers, is out there to be judged on its merits.

Sometimes the need for a posthumous editor is hard to deny. Shakespeare's plays come down to us only in texts supplied by others after his death, and there are discrepancies between the versions. There are also passages that, even to someone versed in the niceties of Elizabethan English, don't make much sense. Someone has to sort it out. Many, many people have done so. their versions can be compared, their rationales for their decisions can be evaluated. We don't have a manuscript in Shakespeare's hand, or a published edition overseen by him during his lifetime, to guide us in this educated guesswork.

Sometimes poets don't edit their own work very well. After suffering a stroke, William Carlos Williams became a very poor proofreader. The posthumous edition of his poetry, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, is superior to the edition proofread by Williams. Litz and MacGowan check the text against magazine publications of individual poems. To cite one example: before the Litz and MacGowan edition appeared, I'd always wondered about a slippage of tense in "The Widow's Lament in Springtime,: "today I notice them / and turned away forgetting." Litz and MacGowan, on the evidence of the magazine version, correct "turned" to "turn." There are a number of similar cases. The editors provide notes that include all variants and always tell the reader when they've intervened.

It's true that editors sometimes muck texts up. Until the Library of America Robert Frost appeared, the only Collected Poems of Frost, edited by Edward Connery Latham, meddled extensively with Frost's punctuation. Nor did he provide notes identifying and justifying his changes. But because Frost's individual volumes remained available, alert scholars and readers noticed and objected to what he had done, and the Library of America edition restores Frost's punctuation (about which Frost was meticulously exact).

As long as the editor is scrupulous about identifying and explaining all changes to existing sources, I don't see any harm in posthumous editing. Readers can accept or reject as they see fit. It's the Lathrop practice of stealth editing that causes mischief. (The earliest publications of Dickinson were similarly amiss in not acknowledging editorial interference--in this case, quite far-reaching editorial interference.)

It is said that Virgil left instructions for the Aeneid to be burned, because he thought it too imperfect Of course we are grateful that he was not obeyed. But suppose he had succeeded in destroying it. If, in his judgment, it was not good enough to leave the shop, on what grounds do we have the authority to overrule him? He was the one responsible for it, after all. Of course we would feel deprived or disappointed (assuming that the very fact of its existence and destrruction had not been lost to posterity), but that would be our problem, not Virgil's.

The real poet knows that a work is never finished, never finalized into the ideal form a reader might think the poem has when they read it on the page or read it on the page. No matter how much I've ever tried to tweak, finesse, edit or rephrase a poem that I've had around for years, there is always a dissatisfaction with how the current version scans. Poet and friend Steve Kowit speaks constantly of poems that he works on for months, years, items that start as drafts that are crafted over time to a final version. Moore herself exercised her option to enage in what "Poetry" was about, a joyfully frustrating process of trying to match up the language with things that are daunting in their intangible elements; condense, expand, rephrase, rearrange the poem's geography. Poetry, of all the arts, is about process, it seems, the closest thing where one can make an art of their modulating perceptions of the world they pass through. Moore's choice of difficult self-assignments bring to mind a cliche, that it's not the destination that matters, but rather the journey to that end. The real poet knows that they never really "finish" a poem, only that they are, finally, done working on it.

Great thread IT. Irony is always humorous, in its way: “The Moveable Feast” (reputations that can rise, if they must). I could listen to Nat King Cole every day. What I call the Christian Bible has had a few re-edits and books expunged (just an observation, not an editorial comment).

IT: should an artist be allowed to change his or her work?

Self Re-editing

I

Think

Artists

Should work to

A drop dead deadline

And submit to authorities.

Anyone notice that I called the offending editor of frost "Latham" and then "Lathrop"? Once I noticed it, I decided to check and found that in fact it's "Lathem," so I was wrong both times.

Sometimes first thoughts are best thoughts. Sometimes they're just mistakes . . .

a couple times recently I misspelled the name of the Tuesday poet with the name right in front of me. Such things happen when we get OLD.

d;-)

Hi, Paul, Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions. Editing to restore a work to its originally intended state (e.g., Litz & MacGowan) seems much less egregious than editing to suit one's own tastes (Lathem).

Hi, MaryAnn, You did a great job of laying out some of the pros and cons of tinkering with original works of poetry. Now are we ready to move on to the subject of colorizing movies?

Hi, Ted, Did you ever know a kid in school who erased until he'd erased right through his paper? Who erased so often his eraser was worn down past the metal band of his pencil? I just don't want to get to that point. Instead, I like to think there's a balance somewhere between spontaneity and eternal revision that feels right and makes sense.

Said the great French poet, Paul Valéry: "Poems are never finished, only abandoned."

Hi islandtime,

You ask an interesting question: Is there a personality trait that makes someone more likely to play with their work? (Pre-publication playing doesn't count in this case, since it is publication that would define permanence for a poem.) For instance, is it an obsessive-compulsive trait? Is it a facet of perfectionism? Is it insecurity?

Maybe, maybe and maybe, ;) but your mention of "perfectionism" coupled with "personality trait" got me to thinking. There is a cognitive process that lies in all of us -- but which predominates in some of us -- that delights in creating, refining, and re-refining organizing systems (including poetry). The revision of itself can be an energizing outlet for creativity and even originality.

When this process (Jungian "Introverted Thinking" or "Ti") is dominant (as it is in two personality types), one might expect to see this kind of revisionism. Maybe Marianne Moore is an ISTP or an INTP, if she's really into such a thing. Or perhaps the process is playing some other role besides the Dominant in her psyche, a role that's driving the desire for perfectionism as such -- intimating a basis in a different type.

wr ()()

denny:

<link>

Possibly one of the most famous paintings of all times. One a King loved so much that he created a whole Museum just to house her captivating smile. Yet, it was a work which even Leonardo never considerd finished - and which he kept for himself so that he could constantly change and improve upon it.

I guess that answers the question well enough for me.

d;-)

If da Vinci were a Thinker (INTP), as all evidence I can think of suggests, then that would certainly explain why he'd kept that one work (and perhaps others) private for constant revision. His Dominant Ti would guarantee that he'd do it with something.

My own Ti seems eager to constantly revise just one original song in the same way, but for a completely different reason (since I'm an ENFP at the core).

wr ()()