TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Revision is my favorite part of the writing process. Of course, I love the rush of the new idea, the honeymoon period with a poem or an essay when it’s still sparkling, but I especially enjoy the creative problem-solving that revision entails. Coleridge wrote that poetry is “the best words in the best order.” I enjoy the challenge posed by having the not best words in the not best order.

I find the challenge of revision invigorating. It wakes my brain up in exciting ways. To revise means, literally, “to see again,” or “to look at again.” Revision is when we take another look at what we’ve made and we see it anew. Each revision, ideally, gets us closer to the piece we sense is there, waiting. But each revision can also pull us farther away from the initial spark that drove us to the page. This tension, this push and pull, is exactly what makes revision dynamic and exciting: We’re hunting something, but we aren’t quite clear about what it looks like or how to find it.

I believe in the magic of multiple revisions. I also believe that we can over-revise. We can look so hard for the finished piece that we believe waits for us inside the messy draft that we scare it off. We can polish it dull. Sometimes we need to go back in order to move forward.

Today’s poem pulls back the curtain on the revision process, showing us how it’s about more than just the text on the page. The poet refers to an earlier poem of theirs, an ekphrastic poem based on a sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn. His work “Candelabra with Heads” features mannequins bandaged in brown duct tape and hung from a wood frame. This poet revised her poem of the same name to remove the last line, but later went back and reinstated it.

In Defense of “Candelabra with Heads”
by Nicole Sealey

                                                                        If you’ve read the “Candelabra with Heads”
                                                                        that appears in this collection and the one
                                                                                  in The Animal,  thank you. The original,
                                                                  the one included here, is an example, I’m told,
                                                                    of a poem that can speak for itself, but loses
                                                           faith in its ability to do so by ending with a thesis
                                                                  question. Yeats said a poem should click shut
                                                                                     like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.
                                                             I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”
                                                                           not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,
                                                         or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination
                                                                       would have us believe, much like faith, faith
                                                           the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.
                                                                               You should know that human limbs burn
                                                                    like branches and branches like human limbs.
                                                                 Only after man began hanging man from trees
                                                                          then setting him on fire, which would jump
                                                                            from limb to branch like a bastard species
                                                                              of bird, did we come to know such things.
                                                                          A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,
                                                                              8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good
                                                     and dead, may someone happen upon the question
                                                                     in question. May that lucky someone be black
                                                        and so far removed from the verb lynch  that she be
                                                                        dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
                                                                        call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.
                                                                    May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.

"In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” by Nicole Sealey. Used by permission of the poet.