Stephen Vincent wrote:
>>So we come to the same issue in what we do. Have we written poems,
>>preserved on paper or disk, that nobody will ever see in their present
>>state, or that become seed for other poems, because we've judged the
>>original to be bad news? How much, for that matter, do we know about the
>>compositional practices of earlier writers?
>>
>>
>
>How much do we want to know? I suspect multiple drafts are often a charm to
>students (learning to write and/or read). It's certainly the advantage of
>going to a University with a library of archival resources - U Texas at
>Austin, for example. To be able to see how Zukofsky resources his materials,
>transformed and/or mediated them into language, etc. UC San Diego for Olson,
>Oppen, Blackburn, Hejinian - etc. etc. I am sure people in other countries
>could site similar resources.
>
>
Kinnell, I think, came up with the tongue-in-cheek idea for a writing
course called "The Draft." He based this on how much composition is
done on the computer, hence any "genesis" of the poem's growth is easily
lost. The idea was to start with a presumably finished poem and work
backwards, have the students invent earlier drafts to make the poem look
as though it had a history. Well, of course they all have histories,
just that those histories are internal rather than something that can be
studied to tell us what?
ken
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