EDITING POETRY is a task made difficult by the modern notion that writing poetry is trivially easy, as easy for a pre-schooler as for Pushkin. J. Bottum writes about it in June 9th 's Weekly Standard (subscribers only link, this late):
The real problem, however, is the poetry that lurks beneath those cover letters, waiting to pounce. Marvelously hopeless poems--like the one that opened, "Hello, butter- colored worm"--almost make it worthwhile. But far too much of the submitted verse is something like the raw pain of tormented animals, and its inarticulate agony would be unbearable if it weren't first unreadable. ... Day after day, the mail brings unendurable sorrow and anger and ache: the raw stuff of poetry, without the poetry.My two-year old, Elizabeth, has a more sensible attitude towards her artistic productions. She doesn't write poems yet, or even, in their conventional form, letters of the alphabet. She does, however, take great pleasure in drawing pictures. She draws some lines on a piece of paper and then shows it to me. Since it just looks like scribbling, I ask,"What is that a picture of?" She is not offended in the least that I can't tell. Rather, I am supposed to ask, so I can better appreciate it. She happily tells me, and goes back to draw some more.
Like T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth does not pretend that the ordinary reader can understand her art without footnotes. Like Ezra Pound, perhaps, she does not even care. Drawing is almost entirely an activity whose purpose is immediate enjoyment by the artist. If a sympathetic observer (i.e., Daddy) is nearby, the enjoyment can be heightened by showing it to him, as a kind of prolongation of the activity, but that is not necessary. Nor is it necessary to save the end product, any more than it is necessary to save a photograph of a game of squash. Saving it might be a nice reminder, but nothing more.
The problem with Mr. Bottum's naive poets is that they don't understand this. They are writing for themselves, but they think other people should be interested too. But we aren't interested in watching a clumsy game of squash by the physically unfit, except maybe for laughs, however much the fatties may be enjoying themselves.
I try to take the same attitude towards my blogging. But if you like reading it too, that's OK.
[more, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.06.14a.htm ]