All writing, in one way or another, is collaborative. To begin with, I would not be able to write at all were I not already profoundly influenced by what others have written, along with the teachers who made demands on my attention to learn my letters and how to use them. But always there is more. As any writer does, I carry with me many rhythms, details, structures, echoes of voices, etc. from what I have read. To the extent that I can write anything that might be worth reading, it is because I have developed a voice in part by losing myself in what I’ve read over the years. Writing is a matter of melding one’s own voice with the voices that form one’s tradition. Writing involves a loss of self and a gain of something other, including the gain of a kind of other self. These ideas are fairly commonplace, and versions of them can be encountered in such writings as those of Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author”) and Michel Foucault (“What is an Author?”), among others.
None of the the foregoing is to say that the individual “author” does not count–after all, Barthe’s and Foucault’s names continue to appear on their books, and certainly I want to know who I’m reading–but that the author counts in complicated ways. One becomes an author by entering into the complicated web of influences and agencies that produce a piece of written work. It is impressive, for example, how many workers are employed in the production of a book. The author is one worker among many, a worker who has no doubt consulted with several others to produce the piece at hand; lists of acknowledgments are one traditional means by which such collaboration is revealed. But there are also the editors, book designers, photographers (often), and others whose efforts give the book its shape.
And sometimes the shape a text takes can vary from what the author set out. In some cases what we then get is a shadow text of a kind, one that can come to dominate, at least for a time, what a given author might have preferred. One of the more famous examples in literary history is the “soiled fish of the sea” in Melville’s White-Jacket. Apparently F. O. Matthiessen spent quite a bit of admiring ink on the image of this “soiled fish,” which was later found to be a printer’s error for the “coiled fish of the sea” that came from Melville’s hand.
Whatever the quality of my own writings, I believe I can claim that one of my poems was the occasion of what must be among the better errors to appear in print, one that most radically revises the poem as a whole. Many years ago I wrote a poem recalling my first visit, at age eighteen, to a Trappist monastery, to speak with the vocation director, for I was interested in the possibility of becoming a monk myself. The poem, entitled “The Monastery Gate,” is divided into two parts; here is the second:
Brother Giles squinted. In the distance
a runner was climbing a hill, passing a combine lumbering beside the road.
Smiling like he saw jokes on the trees, Brother Giles said, “If you want to be a monk, don’t worry so much about clarity; it isn’t being very kind to God.”
Soon he would chant more Psalms in the church.
He said, “It’s the biggest bunch of noise I’ve ever heard.”
I was very pleased when this poem was chosen to appear in an anthology of Catholic poets. When the printed anthology arrived, it was not until I had read the whole poem through a time or two that I noticed the crucial error, which occurs early in the section just quoted:
In the distance
a runner was climbing a hill, passing a concubine lumbering beside the road
I spoke with both of editors, who assured me that the combine was still a farm implement when the manuscript left their hands. But somewhere between their hands and the printed book, the combine became a lumbering concubine. The poor woman sounds like she’s been servicing the monastery for years. As the poet Mary Szybist, whose husband I am, has pointed out, the word ‘lumbering’ removes any sense of exoticism that the word ‘concubine’ might otherwise carry. Earlier I quoted the whole second section to allow the reader to see how radically the poem changes when the concubine lumbers through it. The jokes on the trees, Brother Giles’s admonition, the bunch of noise–all take on a different cast in the presence of the lumbering concubine. The sign of a truly impressive printing error is the extent to which it alters the meaning of the text.
Two notes. First, when I included this poem in my first book–Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003)–I changed the concubine back into a combine. I figure the author gets at least some say. Nevertheless, for a few readers (including me) “The Monastery Gate” includes a shadow poem of a much different kind from what appears by the letter of my book. Second, I have since visited a Trappist monastery several times and can attest that I have never seen a conubine there, lumbering or otherwise. Nevertheless, there she walks through the shadow version of my poem, trying to get a little exercise in the sun.