Where Camelopard Nipped Dogwoodberries

From the fifth to the eleventh of October in 1984, first in Johnstown and then in Syracuse, New York, I wrote a long poem that I originally called something like “One Story of the Five-Mountained Woods.” After a few years, I realized how awful the first title was so I changed it to “Gingerbread Doom.” Only last year, twenty-four years after its creation, did I settle on the title “Gingerbread.”

Maybe my problem is that I can’t give up on anything, that I have to find some way to fix something that seems a little broken to me. So, for whatever the reason, I found myself tonight revising a poem that is almost a quarter of a century old, a poem that still sounds something like me but which does so much that I would never do anymore. The title of this entry—which is a line from the poem—provides a good example.

What I faced tonight was how to edit (“revise” is simply too strong a word) a poem that is now alien to me, trying to improve it, while making sure that the poem remains true to itself, true to a way of writing, a style, even a school of writing, that I really have no connection to. My dilemma was how to find a way to write as if I were half my age again, as if I hadn’t found other, better, ways to write, as if what I had written was good—and so I did.

I still found plenty to like in this ancient poem of mine, which I’m preparing for publication as a small chapbook sometimes next year. I had to edit the poem tonight because otherwise I would have had to design a cover illustration tonight—and I couldn’t do that without knowing what the poem really is, something that I’ll finally know once I find a word for a female yak.

ecr. l’inf.