I have put together three accounts of the process of writing through various drafts toward the finished poems. Each of these brief descriptions includes the various drafts of the poem I was working on. Each process offers a somewhat different route between onslaught and finished product, with differing problems to solve en route.

HOW “BECOMING NEW” BECAME

“Becoming new” started as a rambling love lyric of no particular distinction in first draft. Not atypically, however, for the type of poem revised by cutting as much as by rewriting, most of the imagery of which the later poem would be built was present in the wordy original. Some poems I work on from a stark beginning into more elaboration and development. Some poems, like this one, need pruning to reach a shape.

“How it feels to be touching you”

An Io moth, orange
and yellow as butter
winging through the night
miles to mate
crumbling in the hand to dust
hardly smearing the wall.
It feels like a brick
square and sturdy and pleasing
to the eye and hand
ready to be used
to build something
I can keep warm in
keep tools in
walk on.
Hardy as an onion and layered.
Going into the blood like garlic
secretly antibiotic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grains.
Sweet and fragrant as thyme honey.
Scarce as love,
my dear, what we have started.
Its substance goes out between us
like a hair
that any weight could break,
like a morning web shining.
It flares into pockets of meeting,
dark pools of touch.
What does it mean to me?
What does it mean to you?
We are meaning together.
We become new selves in private.
When I am turning slowly
in our woven hammocks of talk
when I am melting like chocolate
our bodies glued together
I taste myself quite new
I smell like a book
just off the press
You smell like hot bread.
Though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.

By the next version, still with the same title, the poem begins to assume a little shape. It is in paragraphs now, centered each around the imagery. I cut some of the wordier sections but I am still adrift, not yet focussed on what in the experience or the blob of the poem is interesting. The ending is the one that will stay through all versions of the poem. These first two versions were done in rapid succession.

“How it feels to be touching you”

An Io moth, orange
and yellow as butter
wings through the night
miles to mate,
crumbles in the hand to dust
hardly smearing the wall.
We feel like a brick
square and sturdy and pleasing
to the eye and hand
ready to be used
to build something
I can keep warm in
keep tools in
walk on.
Hardy as an onion and layered.
Going into the blood like garlic
pungent and antibiotic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grains.
Sweet and fragrant as thyme honey.
Its substance goes out between us
like a hair
that any weight could break,
like a morning web shining.
It flares into pockets of meeting,
dark pools of touch.
We are meaning together.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk
when I am melting like chocolate
our bodies glued together
I taste myself quite new
I smell like a book
just off the press
You smell like hot bread.
Though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.

At that point I put the poem aside for a while. When I took it out again, I decided that what is interesting is that the two people were friends who have become lovers while still being friends. The wonder of the friend developing the charisma and magic that a lover possesses while still being the same friend is the focus of the poem. The imagery that stresses the strength and dailiness in terms of bricks, buildings, tools disappears, as being irrelevant to the revelation of sensuous pleasure. I realized as I returned to the poem and began to shape it, to focus it, that the sensuality was important to the poem and equally important was leaving the sexes ambiguous. The poem had begun as one about a man with whom in the course of a long friendship, I had a three-week sexual involvement; but by the time I returned to work on it, the piece seemed to me more about friendships between women that become love relationships. Then I realized I wanted to make the poem truly and carefully androgynous (a word I am not fond of) because friendship is.

The hair imagery disappeared when I realized I was using the same metaphor in another poem of about the same vintage—“Bridging,” also contained in To Be of Use—where the imagery is far more relevant to a completely different theme. The associations of smelling like a book just off the press seemed inappropriate to the new focus, and the hot bread image seemed trite, so they were lopped off, replaced by a simple statement of the theme. The first stanza remained the same.

“Something borrowed”

How it feels to be touching
you: an Io moth, orange
and yellow as butter
wings through the night
miles to mate,
crumbles in the hand
hardly smears the wall.
Yet our meaning together
is hardy as an onion
and layered.
Going into the blood like garlic,
pungent and antibiotic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grain.
Sweet and fragrant as thyme honey:
this substance goes out between us
a morning web shining.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk,
when I am melting like chocolate
our bodies glued together
I taste myself quite new
in your mouth.
You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you?
Though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.

In the next version, published in To Be of Use and anthologized, the title settled into “We become new.” In fact there is an anthology named for this poem: We Become New, edited by Lucille Iverson and Kathryn Ruby (New York: Bantam Books, 1975). This title emphasized what I had fixed on as the core of the poem. There are many routes into poems. Sometimes when I launch into a poem, I know exactly where I’m going, although it may take me one or many drafts to fix that vision in words. Sometimes, as in this poem, the basic imagery is there but I don’t know quite what I’m getting at for a while. I have to hack away at it until I perceive what it is I’m trying to say, even in a case this simple. The discovery of the secret sensuality or the repressed sexuality in a friendship either between women or between a man and a woman is a common experience that makes this poem interesting to a number of people, who have mentioned it to me, or written me about it. We tend to see people with whom we make love as more luminous, more radiantly physical than those with whom we haven’t been as intimate. In the case of someone we have known for a long time or perhaps even worked with, we had thought we knew her or him quite well. We feel dazzled with the change of perception love-making brings.

The morning web shining I liked, but somehow it didn’t fit. It wasn’t exactly a web I was dealing with—not a couple formation. Furthermore, I had noticed a strong oral component in the imagery, especially after the first stanza, and I like that and wished to concentrate on it. The moth smeared on the wall also disappeared. What does crushing a moth have to do with sensuality unless you’re being a little weirder than I intended? I decided the image was peculiar and distracting.

The two changes I like best occur in the third stanza, where the chocolate image finally comes into its own, and where what is experienced new when the perimeters of the relationship change, is “everything” rather than “myself.” In that small context, I like the large claim.

“We become new”

How it feels to be touching
you: an Io moth, orange
and yellow as pollen,
wings through the night
miles to mate,
could crumble in the hand.
Yet our meaning together
is hardy as an onion
and layered.
Goes into the blood like garlic.
Sour as rose hips.
Gritty as whole grain.
Fragrant as thyme honey.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk,
when I am chocolate melting into you,
I taste everything new
in your mouth.
You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you? Now
though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.

When I included this poem, finally, in my selected poems (Circles on the Water [1982]), the only change I made was to move the last line of stanza two down to become the first line of stanza three. That brought the poem into regular six line stanzas. Although I talk a lot about the ear being primary, that is one of the occasional changes made primarily for the eyes. I liked the look on the page better.

THE EVOLUTION OF “ROUGH TIMES”

“Rough times” is a poem that began with a rather prosy fragment:

Those who speak of good and simple
in the same mouthful
who say good and innocent
inhabit some other universe than I struggle through
I find it hard to be good
and the good hard: hard to know
hard to choose when known
and hard to accomplish when chosen:
rocky, sprace and
good makes my hands bleed,
good keeps me awake with fear, lying on broken shards
good pickles me in the vinegar of guilt
good goads me with burrs in my underwear

I have no idea whatsoever about the meaning of “rocky, sprace and.” However, this note was a sufficient fragment to launch the poem, not immediately I think. The above jottings were an idea for a poem which remained dormant for a while—in this case I think a matter of weeks. The fragment arose from my irritation with the presumption that good is simple or clear, that ethics and matters of right and wrong are as automatic to decide as calling up the time by dialing N-E-R-V-O-U-S on the telephone and resetting your watch for accuracy. If you do not accept the prevailing patriarchal standards of right and wrong, then you have to hammer out your own ethics at the same time that you try to change yourself to adhere to your values.

A short time—weeks—later, I wrote a true first draft. The first stanza is one that will remain through all subsequent drafts, but after that, I had a lot more trouble. This version remains fairly prosy although some of the imagery about two thirds of the way through is strong enough to stay the route. Finally this version simply trails off. I could find no completion to my complaint.

Trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future.
Tearing down the walls of cells
when nothing has been evolved
to replace that protection.
A prolonged vivisection
of my own tissues, carried out
under the barking muzzle of guns.
Those who speak of good and simple
in the same mouthful of tongue and teeth
inhabit some other universe
than I trundle my bag of bones through.
…
I find it hard to know what’s good,
hard to choose when known,
hard to accomplish it when chosen,
hard to repeat it when blundered through.
…
Good runs the locomotive of the night over my bed/chest
good pickles me in the vinegar of guilt
good robs the easy words as they rattle over my teeth
and leave me naked as an egg.
Some love comfort and some pleasure;
perhaps of the good, the beautiful and the true
each person can crave
We are tools who carve ourselves

You can see here two of the stanzas evolving as I work. I was playing with crave/carve at the end but the playing came to nothing.

The next draft still has no title. The beginning three line stanzas are slowly taking shape. Finally, I have an ending; I see where the poem is going. Basically, the verb “evolve” in the second stanza had hidden inside it my ending.

Evolution is a concept with a marked place in my poetry, forming an important element in poems such as “For Shoshana-Pat Swinton” about taking an active role in history; “Two higher mammals” about trying to change from what I mistakenly believed then about human prehistory as predators, for I hadn’t yet read Richard Leakey or Elizabeth Fisher; “For Walter and Lilian Lowenfels” about trying to grasp one's own time; “The perpetual migration” from The Lunar Cycle, that compares us to seabirds and views our whole prehistory and history in terms of social evolution; and the recent poem “Let us gather at the river.”

The poem is still shapeless and wordy, but it begins to acquire a direction and a consciousness of its intent.

We are trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future,
bulldozing / bombing / blasting
Blasting the walls of the cells
that nothing has yet
been evolved to replace.
A prolonged vivisection
on my own tissues, carried out
under the barking muzzle of guns.
Those who speak of the good and simple
in the same mouthful of tongue and teeth / in the same
                    sandwich
inhabit some other universe
than I trundle my bag of bones through.
I find it hard to know what’s good,
hard to choose when known,
hard to accomplish when chosen,
hard to repeat when blundered into.
Good draws blood from my scalp and the roots of my nerves.
Good runs the locomotive of the night over my bed.
Good pickles me in the brown vinegar of guilt.
Good robs the easy words as they rattle off my teeth
and leaves me naked as an egg.
We are tools who carve ourselves,
blind hands righting each other,
usually wrong.
Remember that pregnancy is beautiful only
to those who don’t look closely
at the distended belly, waterlogged legs, squashed bladder
clumsily she lumbers and wades, who is about
to give birth.
No new idea is seldom borne on the halfshell
attended by graces.
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Most mutants die; the minority refract
the race through the prisms of their genes.
How ugly were the first fish with air sacs
as they hauled up on the muddy flats
heaving and gasping. How clumsy we are in this huge air
we reach with such effort
and can not yet breathe.

I think the association of Venus with the lungfishes is that they are both born from the ocean, with tremendous novelty. And like Lucretius, I associate Venus with the energy in nature. That’s what the as yet unnamed reference to her is doing here.

Finally comes the version printed in Living in the Open. The poem now has a title taken from a periodical called Rough Times, where the poem was first published. Rough Times was the second incarnation of the collectively edited periodical known, in order, as Journal of Radical Therapy, Rough Times, Radical Therapist, and finally State and Mind. I named the poem for a magazine that made a genuine and prolonged effort to connect the personal and the political with fairness to both, that recognized the problems of attempting to live in new ways, that dealt with the bruises and abrasions of living in a brutal, racist, and deeply hierarchical society but also dealt consistently with the casualties of trying to change that society. The whole collective at Rough Times was extremely helpful when I was researching mental institutions, psychosurgery, and electrode implantation for Woman on the Edge of Time.

The poem in this final version has also acquired a dedication to Nancy Henley, now head of women's studies at UCLA. At that time Nancy was living in the Boston area and we saw each other frequently. We are friends equally fascinated through our different disciplines by the personal and the political dimensions of the psychology of every day life—how men and women and people with different positions in the social hierarchy and different amounts of power address each other, touch each other, question or confront each other. When I was writing Small Changes and Nancy was writing He Says/She Says, we often exchanged observations.

Nancy Henley is a rare dear person, a passionately committed feminist with a strong sense of economic issues, a woman who deals with the theory of social change and also with the practical consequences, who has always taken on far more than her share of the daily work of change—the unglamorous equivalent of taking out the garbage in committee work—as well as writing, speaking, and always thinking clearly and well. I know how hard her life and her choices have been at times, so I dedicated the poem to her.

I had by this version decided on a combination of three line and five line stanzas. The “yard engine” was a better metaphor than in earlier versions, for I remember in childhood watching yard engines shuttle back and forth, back and forth. The extended description of the ninth month of pregnancy has been reduced to one line. The reference to Botticelli's Venus is more explicit and reduced in length.

One of the technical aspects of the poem that picked up the most as the drafts went on is the matter of line breaks. Note the difference between the rather flat:

Most mutants die; the minority refract
the race through the prisms of their genes.

and the less obvious, far more potent setting off of the image:

Most mutants die; only
a minority refract the race
through the prisms of their genes.

The tools who carve each other have dropped out entirely, as that image didn’t belong to the rest of the poem once I had found my predominant biological metaphors. The vivisection image came early and I still like it, reflecting as it does the pain attendant upon trying to live as if you were changed while trying to change the society.

One of the reasons I worked on the poem after its rather unpromising beginning was a sense that such a subject is difficult to tackle in a lyric but also important. A great many people try to live ethically with a sense of wanting to move toward a better future; but I have seen little in the poetry of our time that alludes to that not uncommon activity. I changed the parallel sentence structure in the last stanza because I wanted to emphasize our clumsiness rather than to emphasize equally the ugliness of the lungfish. I also had used the rhetorical device of initial repetitions earlier in the poem in two places: the four lines in the fifth stanza that begin with “Good” followed by a verb, and the last two lines of the sixth stanza, which both begin “More commonly it.” I liked the first two instances of initial repetition much better than the third usage.

I think the final strength of the poem lies in the increasingly concrete language and images and the hard-working vivid verbs. Thus while the poem is about a fairly abstract idea, it is not an abstract poem.

“Rough times”

—for Nancy Henley

We are trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future,
blasting cell walls
that no protective seal or inhibition
has evolved to replace.
I am conducting a slow vivisection
on my own tissues, carried out
under the barking muzzle of guns.
Those who speak of good and simple
in the same sandwich of tongue and teeth
inhabit some other universe.
Good draws blood from my scalp and files my nerves.
Good runs the yard engine of the night over my bed.
Good pickles me in the brown vinegar of guilt.
Good robs the easy words as they rattle off my teeth,
leaving me naked as an egg.
Remember that pregnancy is beautiful only
at a distance from the distended belly.
A new idea rarely is born like Venus attended by graces.
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Must mutants die: only
a minority refract the race
through the prisms of their genes.
Those slimy fish with air sacs were ugly
as they hauled up on the mud flats
heaving and gasping. How clumsy we are
in this new air we reach with such effort
and cannot yet breathe.

GENESIS OF “THE SUN”

The scheme of the Tarot poems, the eleven cards of a Tarot reading, was worked out before I began the first of the poems. I no longer have any memory of in what order I first wrote the poems, but the earliest fragment of “The Sun” I have extant dates from the scheme of the whole. On a piece of paper I have listed the cards I planned to work with—not even the final list, for in the notes on that piece of graph paper, three of the cards are different from those I actually wrote about. Next to the sun I have written:

us into the new world
concrete images of liberation
from the garden outward
naked on a horse that is not bridled
androgynous child

The first draft of the poem I can find begins with the image on the deck I was using created by Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite, as do all subsequent versions of the poem. That description comprises about a third of this draft.

From that point on, in the last two-thirds of the poem, I was describing a particular vision, also the seed of Woman on the Edge of Time, which did emerge from meditation on this particular card when I was preparing to write the Tarot poems. Some of the cards I was able to penetrate immediately and got a fast fix on what in their imagery and their symbols I wanted to use and how I wanted to treat them; others of the cards resisted my comprehension (beyond the obvious, I mean). “The Sun” was a resistant one until it came blindingly.

Thus the structure of this particular poem was set a priori: beginning with the card and then proceeding to an attempt to embody what I had imagined. Even the image of the sunrise that ends the poem in all versions was a given, being obvious in the card and given in the vision. The struggle with the different versions is almost entirely a struggle of cleaner, stronger language and better rhythms. I was committed to a fairly long line in all the Tarot poems.

“The Total Influence or Outcome: The Sun”

Androgynous child whose hair curls into flowers,
naked you ride the horse, without saddle or bridle,
naked too between your thighs, from the walled garden
          outward.
Coarse sunflowers of desire, whose seeds the birds and I eat
which they break on their beaks and I with my teeth,
nod upon your journey: child of the morning
whose sun can only be born red from us who strain to give
          birth.
Joy to the world, joy, and the daughters of the sun will dance
Grow into your horse, child: let there be no more riders and
          ridden.
Learn his strong thighs and teach him your good brain.
A horse running in a field yanks the throat open like a bell
swinging with joy, you will run too and work and till and
          make good.
Child, where are you headed, with your arms spread wide,
as a shore, have I been there, have I seen it shining
like oranges among their waxy leaves on a morning tree?
I do not know your dances, I cannot translate your tongue
into words of my own, your pleasures are strange to me
as the rites of bees: yet you are the golden flowers
of a melon vine, that grows out of my belly
up where I cannot see any more in the full strong sun.
My eyes cannot make out those shapes of children like burning clouds
who are not what we are: they go barefoot on the land like
          savages,
they have computers as household pets, they are six or seven
          sexes
and all one sex, they do not own or lease or control:
they are of one body and they are private as shamans
learning their magic at the teats of stones.
They are all magicians and do not any more forget their
          birthright of self
dancing in and out through the gates of the body standing
          wide.
Like a bear lumbering and clumsy and speaking no tongue
they know, I waddle into the fields of their play.
We are not the future, we are stunted slaves mumbling over
the tales of dragons our masters tell us, but we will be free
and you children will be free of us and uncomprehending
as we are of those shufflers in caves who scraped for fire
and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,
the mastodon with its tusks, the giant cave bear,
the predators that had penned them up in the dark, cowering
          so long.
The sun is rising, look, it is the sun.
I cannot look on its face, the brightness blinds me,
but from my own shadow becoming distinct, I know
that now at last it is growing light.

In the next draft I have preserved, the poem has assumed verse paragraphs and has been cut somewhat. There are many small omissions and small developments, but not enough difference for me to feel it is worth quoting in its entirety. The image of the melon vine came out of an old woodcut I had seen, medieval I believe, where Abraham sees all his descendants growing up out of his prostrate body.

However, I do feel it’s worth quoting the third draft.

“The Total Influence or Outcome of the Matter: The Sun”

Androgynous child whose hair curls into flowers,
naked you ride the horse without saddle or bridle
easy between your thighs, from the walled garden outward.
Coarse sunflowers of desire whose seeds birds crack open
nod upon your journey, child of the morning whose sun
can only be born bloody from us who strain to give birth
Joy to the world, joy, and the daughters of the sun will dance
like motes of pollen in the summer air
Grow into your horse, child: let there be no more riders and
          ridden.
Child, where are you heading with arms spread wide
as a shore, have I been there, have I seen that land shining
as oranges do among their waxy leaves on a morning tree?
I do not know your dances, I cannot translate your tongue
to words of my own, your pleasures are strange to me
as the rites of bees; yet you are the yellow flower
of a melon vine growing out of my belly
though it climbs up where I cannot see in the strong sun.
My eyes cannot decipher those shapes of children like burning
clouds
who are not what we are: they go barefoot like savages,
they have computers as household pets; they are six or seven
          sexes
and only one sex; they do not own or lease or control.
They are of one body and of tribes. They are private as
          shamans
learning each her own magic at the teats of stones.
They are all magicians and technicians
and do not any more forget their birthright of self
dancing in and out through the gates of the body standing
          wide.
A bear lumbering I waddle into the fields of their play.
We are stunted slaves mumbling over the tales
of dragons our masters tell us, but we will be free.
Our children will be free of us uncomprehending
as are we of those shufflers in caves who scraped for fire
and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,
the tusked mastodon, the giant cave bear,
predators that had penned them up, cowering so long.
The sun is rising, look: it is blooming new.
I cannot look in the sun's face, its brightness blinds me
but from my own shadow becoming distinct I know
that now at last it is beginning to grow light.

Here the second paragraph has become quite short. The extended development of the horse has been lopped back to one line. In the fourth paragraph the children of the future have become not merely magicians but magicians and technicians, a not particularly felicitous phrase. The “gates of the body” I associate with Blake, some amalgam of his “The doors of perception” with “Twelve gates to the City,” a song I recall from civil rights days.

I am still having trouble with the image and words of the last paragraph. I am aware as I write it of Plato's cave. I am still having trouble with the line breaks and the phrasing of the words themselves.

The final version of the poem makes many small changes: in the second line, “the horse” becomes “a horse” in keeping with its diminished importance while the second paragraph has been assimilated into the first. I have finally realized that it is not the future sun that ought to be bleeding but the mother giving birth, and fixed that.

In the second verse paragraph, the replacement of “to words of my own” with “to words I use” is a matter of rhythm. The image of the oranges among their leaves on that tree has finally gone—it never quite took or worked—and been replaced by a far more appropriate image “like sun spangles on clean water rippling,” a line superior in its rhythm by far. The sun entering that line meant I had to change the last line of the stanza, where to avoid repetition “strong sun” became “strong light,” a more accurate word in that context.

The children have stopped being “like” burning clouds and that has become an alternate way to see them. There are many small cuts there, “seven sexes” for “six or seven sexes”—I was thinking of paramecia. “The teats of stones” has become “the teats of stones and trees” because I wanted a longer line and because that seemed to me more evocative of the kind of earth reverence I was trying to bring to mind. Finally it is “technicians and peasants” they become. “Magic” has already appeared and what I wanted was the connection to the basic means of production, agriculture, the commitment to the land insisted on, along with the full use of science. Finally instead of only a “birthright of self” it is that plus “their mane of animal pride” they do not forget. I wanted to describe a people sensual, proudly physical, connected to other living beings and the earth, who were also highly civilized in the best sense.

“The fields of their play” has become “the fields of their work games” because I wanted to emphasize their productivity and did not want them to sound trivial or infantile.

I finally got the ending together. That changing smell of the air at dawn is something I have often noticed in the country. I also got the line breaks functional at last in the ending.

The sun is rising, feel it: the air smells fresh.
I cannot look in the sun's face, its brightness blinds me,
but from my own shadow becoming distinct
I know that now at last
it is beginning to grow light.

When I put this poem in my selected poems (Circles on the Water [1982]) I made only one change. I took out the mastodon, as not properly a predator and because it was messing up the line breaks. I broke it as follows:

and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,
the giant cave bear, predators
that had penned them up cowering so long.