Sunday 27 March 2011

The Reason Artists Jump Out the Window


Kevin Spenst interviews Signal Editions poet Linda Besner on the subject of revision.
The thing about revision for me is that it’s at this stage that you struggle most mightily to make a poem into something it’s not. And then you have to decide what else it is, and whether you can still feel—if not the same way about it, then feel something for it. I just finished Salvatore Scibona’s novel The End, and there’s a line in it I loved: "Disappointment was the result of an idea’s attempt to miscegenate with the visible world." The poem in my mind and the poem on the page are never quite the same poem, and it’s always painful to accept that.
Read the rest here. Linda's debut, The Id Kid, is ready to drop next month.

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