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Review of Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions
Edited by Robert Hartwell Fiske and Laura Cherry
Marion Street Press, Inc., 2008
Reviewed by Matthew Falk

To the uninitiated, poetry can look a lot like magic, a quasi-mystical product of pure inspiration. Notwithstanding our hardnosed era of MFA programs and the Death of the Author, many folks continue to cherish a Romantic image of the poet as a solitary übermensch of extraordinary sensitivity, looming on a windswept precipice (or, perhaps, perched on a bar stool) channeling iambs and couplets, a sort of lightning rod for verse. In reality, however, writing poems, like most things worth doing, takes a lot of hard and sometimes tedious work. Against both Wordsworth’s well-known formula that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and Ginsberg’s rather pithier “First thought, best thought,” one would do well to recall Yeats’s admission in “Adam’s Curse”: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

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