DEAD POEMS
Sara Cassidy
“To speak is almost to say I know. But
in most cases, artists are speaking about things they don’t know or are still
in the process of knowing.” – visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, in Who Reads
Poetry: Fifty Views from Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Last night, I opened the file
labelled DEAD POEMS.
It was a sleepy evening. My partner
lay on the bed staring at his phone. I’d just finished a novel (An Advent Calendar, Shena McKay), and to
start another so quickly felt greedy and disloyal. I did not have the desire to
invent anything new, from scratch – from lightning and primordial ooze.
The file contained poems I’d run at
many times, deleting, adding, moving ink around, but all I’d really done was
shovel dirt on the initial spark. I’d given up on the poems years ago. What a surprise, then – the moon was not
full, the stars stood in their usual unaligned mess – when the poems shuffled
their stiff limbs out of the way and let me in.
For the last few years, I have been
editing professionally, for other writers, for a publishing house, for a
government website, and, currently, for Hansard, the transcript of debate in
parliament (in my case, the B.C. Legislature).
Though I sometimes consider my
Hansard job glorified stenography rather than editing, I like it. We turn the
oral into the written, via the keyboard, preserving each politician’s idiolect – his or her unique way of
wielding language. Punctuation is our “first line of defence”, with which we
corral, tack down and usher through. Sometimes we permit a comma splice or
run-on sentence, because they are closer to the truth.
The Hansard editor’s aim is to be
invisible, as hands-off as possible. At peak production, 24 editors produce
16,000 perfect words in an hour, and the entire script should appear as if
recorded by the same hand (the Style Guide is a behemoth). What I’ve learned is
that speech is character, and editing is less about control than mirroring,
creating a genuine likeness.
As well as working as an editor for
the last few years, I’ve been parenting teenagers. “You are being fired as
their manager,” a parenting guru told me. “Your hope is to be re-hired as a
consultant.” The work here, too, is about letting go, and guiding
invisibly. A light touch and a whole lot
of trust. Seeing the other for who they are, and not what I want them to be.
I worked at the dead poems with a strange
passivity. I think it was receptiveness. As I worked, I observed that the
greater part of typing is moving fingers over the keyboard, rather than
pressing keys.
Shazam.
Several dead poems revived. They said what they’d been meaning to say; I heard them
for the first time.
After an hour, my partner put down
his phone and asked how things were going. “Great!” I said, falling onto him. I
felt light. It was as if I’d crossed a long bridge that had been thick with fog.
I was out of the fog and on a new, clear bank.
When I used to sit down to write,
I’d put on a cloak of confidence, authoritativeness. I’d clear my throat: “This
is what I want to say.”
Now, instead, quiet as a prayer,
I’ll whisper, to myself and reader, as if one and the same: “You know this.”
Then I’ll wait to see what we know.
Sara Cassidy revives
poems in Victoria, B.C. She is trying to quit writing children's books and get
back to writing plays and fiction for adults.
