In my last post, a quote from Emerson reached me at just the right moment in my own life. In looking into the quote’s context in Emerson’s journals, I found myself returned to one of my own obsessions: the writing process itself. Last fall, I loosely organized my graduate poetry workshop in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University around process and revision, and though that semester’s long over, I still find myself adding to the syllabus in my head when I encounter new material. Coming across Robert D. Richardson’s First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process was one such recent moment. Richardson writes of when Emerson became the editor of The Dial, a Transcendentalist publication of the 1840s (revived in the 1920s as a Modernist publication):
[H]e made room in the magazine for a new department (he called it “Verses of the Portfolio”) which would present emerging work, work not yet fixed or final or ready for conventional publication . . . Emerson could quite calmly publish work that was not yet publishable because he was sure that process mattered more than product, that the act of writing was more important than the written and finished piece. “Power ceases, he once wrote – splendidly – “in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes.”
This emphasis on process is not the same as either effortlessness or complacency. Richardson writes:
Emerson wrote rapidly, so rapidly that the ink often wasn’t dry when he turned over a page, but he did not write easily. He felt assailed by endless disincentives to write. His strategy was not to paper over the problems, but to drag them into full sun, with humor if he could, without it if he must. The essential thing was to try again. He noted how parents watch their children get knocked down or set back and how these same parents learn to pray for their children’s resilience. It’s not the setback that matters, it’s what happens next.
As in Emerson’s time, we are most accustomed to reading a writer’s work only after the implied “seal of approval” that comes with publication. The writing workshop and the library archive are the primary places we can go to witness writing in a state of deshabille, as participant or voyeur. But, as with Emerson’s “Verses of the Portfolio,” there are a few folks doing the work of making process publishable and thus visible and thus part of the conversation about what writing does and is. Two publications come to mind for me: draft: The Journal of Process and Pelorus Press. Draft is the more established of the two, founded in 2010 by Mark Polanzak and Rachel Yoder. It has expanded to include a blog and a podcast, The FAIL SAFE. I recommend these for insights into the writing process–the blog also has a focus on process as it relates to classroom teaching and writing exercises that may be of interest to both writers and teachers of writing. (I also can’t talk about process-related interviews without recommending Brian Brodeur’s terrific process-themed site, How a Poem Happens; each post features an interview with a poet describing how a particular poem of theirs came to be.) That said, it is one thing to hear a writer talk about process, and it is another to witness it in motion. Both are well worth our time, but it is rarer to actually see a record of that process unfold and rarer still to see it published. Pelorus Press has only put out two issues so far, but it seems they, too, are following in Emerson’s footsteps, as a letter from the founding editors Cahaley Markman and Dylan D. Debelis begins:
There is a phrase that says “we are all the ages we’ve ever been.” Well, we believe that our poems are also all the ages they’ve ever been, and the point of publication should be to show the whole poem, not just the finished project.
I appreciate this phrasing for its take on the word “whole.” If a “whole poem” includes all its drafts, then to be “whole” on a personal level would mean a life lived in process, a life that continuously (to borrow Emerson’s word) becomes.