Revising, Anew

Sat May 03 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

At her newsletter, Fleeting Temples, the poet Danusha Laméris recently wrote a post comparing the first draft and final versions of her excellent poem, "Small Kindnesses." If you've not read the poem before, you should; it's the second poem on this page at her personal site.

It's a poem that melts away as you read it, like in these opening lines:

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

It's a list of sorts: a list of reminders that the world can be good, paired with a list of reminders that most of us want to live in a good world. Lameris ends by probing the meaning of these brief moments of kindness:

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

It's enlightening to peek into the writing and revision process of others, and Laméris shares a lot of writing wisdom in her post: in revising, she looks for "the shadow that is underneath" what she is writing about and tries to draw that out; she consciously looks for ways to add texture.

But I was particularly taken by her comments on revision as a life practice:

In any given life, so much can benefit from revision. We revise where we live, who we spend time with, what we do with our time. Sometimes all of the above. And on the page, as in life, we might benefit from reconsidering what we value and how to be as true to ourselves as we can be, even when that truth is a little quirkily, at the edge of sentimental, or flat-out strange.

I love that she sees revising as a life practice that is also useful in writing, not the other way around. If I had tried to come at such an idea, I think I would have intuitively imagined the causal relationship running the opposite direction: that is, I would naturally described revision as a writing practice that is fruitful when applied to life. Wouldn't have thought twice about it.

But here she suggests the opposite, so casually that you almost miss it. Something opens up in Laméris's formula that is quite powerful, and it has me thinking about revision as something other than a writing practice.

I recently read a Dada poem, "Xray" by the fascinating Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -- a poem for which we have ten (!) extant versions. The poem itself is a tough read: how can a poem that seems so inscrutable simultaneously feel so intense? But you can compare the versions of "Xray" at this very cool site at the University of Maryland.

Freytag-Loringhoven published little poetry during her lifetime, despite her great influence in many fields (including literature). Much of her work, published and unpublished, has multiple versions extant, and in some cases she sought to publish multiple versions directly alongside each other. So Tanya Clement and Gaby Divay show us in their digital edition of what they call "The Firstling/Erstling/He Complex". Tanya Clement and Gaby Divay worked on this digital edition of this "complex" of related works (or versions?) by Freytag-Loringhoven, works written "over a twenty-year period that includes thirty-three versions with multiple titles in two languages" (!!!).

On the one hand, these versions seem to speak to something we would normally call revising. In their introduction to a collection of Freytag-Loringhoven's work, Body Sweats, Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo describe a "paring down" of a work over time as integral to the poet's "editorial process":

"... the Baroness's editorial process consisted of repeatedly paring down her lines until they became word lists ... Such a rigorous removal of connective language was purposefully Dada." You can see this quite vividly when comparing versions over time, and I think in everyday speak we would simply call this "revising."

Yet in Clement and Divay's introduction to their digital edition of "Firstling...", they describe this process with slightly different language, calling this process of "reduction" one of Freytag-Loringhoven's "poetic techniques." They also describe another technique used across versions of her related works: translation between languages (and resulting wordplay). They emphasize that these techniques were also deeply interwoven with particular aspects of the poet's life.

Put another way, the poet's versioning was not "just" revising a particular poem. They were ongoing techniques in her making of poetry from the start and, further, they were life-making techniques.

What if creation is not a definitive act, with clear beginnings and endings?

God called the light Day and called the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day.

-- Genesis 1:5

In the Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, Rabbis Yehuda bar Simon and Abahu hone in on the past tense in the second sentence of this verse: there was evening and there was morning:

Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon said: “It will be evening” is not written here, but rather, “it was evening” – from here we learn that there had been an order to time even beforehand.
Rabbi Abahu said: This teaches that He continuously created worlds and destroyed them, until He created the current one, and said: ‘This one pleases Me, those did not please Me.’

God as a painter, having trouble getting the colors just right. God as a builder, struggling to square the corners, to level the foundation.

But what relation do past worlds have to ours, to the present world?

From Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism:

Although a great many prior worlds are said to have been created and destroyed, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev insisted that “Everything God created exists forever, and never ceases to be.” And in Esh Kadosh, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira identifies the creation and destruction of the prior worlds with the Shattering of the Vessels. Furthermore, he states that God made the present universe out of those broken vessels.

God, imperfectly whiting out the canvas instead of tossing it completely.

God, disassembling the leaning frame into parts, returning to the blueprints with eraser in hand.