In my
undergraduate days, I had an editing job on the college literary
magazine. Like so many things from that era of Right and Wrong Answers, I
thought I could apply copy-editing guidelines to our poetry submissions.
A guy named Randy (I think) became frustrated and shouty when I tried to edit a poem
following my favorite rules – consistency, grammar and proper spelling. The poem
was an allegory for life and shooting craps. I wanted to spell “dice” the same
way throughout the poem, getting rid of the poet’s alternate “dies,” clearly a mistake.
I don’t even
remember what Randy said, something along the lines of “that’s not how poetry
works” and “you can’t mess with the poet’s words.” My comma rules ruined the
pauses and flow and and and. He gave an exasperated explanation that the
spelling of “dies” played with the theme of death.
D’oh. And duh.
And light bulb.
My brain
exploded.
In that pissed-off
moment, he taught me more about poetry – reading and writing it – than I’d
ever learned in school (before or after). In that moment, I learned about word
choice and line breaks and climbing inside the writer’s head.
