Some Revisions on Editing

Ten years ago, Canarium Books became a reality. From my vantage a decade out, this venture—which I co-edit with the publisher Josh Edwards, and Robyn Schiff and Lynn Xu—appears to have been inevitable. Largely, because of the energy and tenacity Josh brings to every project he undertakes. He wills impossible projects into being, and the fact that Canarium is still publishing books today is evidence of this. 

And I don’t use the word “impossible” loosely. Starting and sustaining a press is a ridiculous undertaking. If said press traffics in contemporary poetry, including translation, you can add “ludicrous” and “foolish” to the list. Most readers of Harriet know this in some way, either because your books are published on a small poetry press or because you run one. So I am writing this post not to trot out Canarium’s origin story, which you can learn about here and here, nor to lament the state of small press publishing in the digital age (people still buy printed matter), nor to point out what should be absolutely clear to anyone with skin in the poetry game, that publishers and editors of small presses are a peculiar type, masochists (the time and money spent!) on the one hand, yet, on the other, blessedly blind to market pressures as they (we) help usher new poems into book form and from there, hopefully, into readers’ hands. 

I wanted instead to try and articulate what it means to edit a book of poems. I realize, having participated in some way in the publication of 27 books (and having published two books of my own with two different presses, and thus, two sets of editors), that I know nearly nothing about how to properly bring a book of poems into being. I am not referring here to the production cycle, which is relatively straight forward, if often stressful and anxiety producing. I am thinking of how, as an outsider to a text, I am supposed to enter into it. But not as a reader (this is its own complex thing). As someone who is charged with assessing this text to see if it needs amendment, alteration. 

Clearly, given that many books of poetry annually are published via the contest route, and others via presses that simply do not offer editorial input, for whatever reasons, many poets never enter into a working relationship with another person (an editor) that has as its focus their poems. In conversation over the past 15 or so years with other magazine and small press editors, I have often lamented this fact. I took the position that it is the main responsibility of any press, large or small, to work with their authors on the particulars of the manuscript: line edits, order, cuts, additions, even titles. It seemed to me that simply acquiring a manuscript, assigning it an ISBN, and slapping a cover around it was unfulfilling. 

I think the situation is more complicated. I have read enough striking, stirring books of poems that I know were not stepped on in any editorial sense that I have begun to reshape my thinking on what an editor’s job is. At Canarium, we generally try to engage with each manuscript we accept for publication in an editorial fashion, assigning each title to one of our four editors, who work with the author from acquisition to the production stage. I have witnessed Robyn’s work as an editor on several books, and I observed the care she takes to think through how each poem interacts with the others in a collection, and to communicate her thoughts—never demands, but suggestions to consider—to the poets she has worked with. I have done the same with several other of Canarium’s authors, breaking down their manuscripts poem by poem, often marking up a text with suggested cuts, making note of poems that appeared to not work in concert with the others, and relocating poems and whole sections. 

What happens next is to communicate these possible changes to the poet, whose very vision is what I have now proposed to alter. 

And this is a model of editing that resembles the ways in which poems are scrutinized in workshops. There is an underlying structure to this approach that presumes any poem or manuscript entering this process must be critiqued, cajoled, reshaped. A workshop, at least traditionally, exists to reinforce this concept. As a former MFA student in poetry, I recall leaving most workshop discussions of my poems with the profound sense that I was a crappy poet. I don’t mean to indicate that I wasn’t, but it seemed to me that, since everyone was expected to have something to say about each poem under discussion, most students would dutifully vivisect the poem on the table, and the result would be an echo chamber of heartless (mostly) critiques that registered as white noise. 

And yet, there were times when a teacher or fellow student would say something enlightening, would offer advice on how to expand on an idea or image. These were the times when I felt inspired to return to my writing once class ended, to see how I could use their insights to reengage with the language and thinking in the poem. This was the workshop model at its best. And so I imagine that an editor’s role in working on a manuscript of poems is complicated in the same ways. 

Simply put, each manuscript I’ve edited required something different from the last. Two of them—Robert Fernandez’s We Are Pharaoh and Michael Morse’s Void and Compensation—were first books, which are truly special and tricky, in that they will become the origin text for their future audience, an audience as yet largely unknown. With those two remarkable books, I offered both poets a reading of their vision of the world—this is what poems are, after all. I suggested line edits in some cases. I suggested cutting whole poems. I suggested ideas of reorder. All the while, I hoped that they wouldn’t discover what I was truly feeling: tremendous fear. 

This fear is difficult to articulate, largely because it has taken me a decade of editing to discover. I have always taken my editorial responsibility seriously, perhaps too seriously. I assumed that to edit meant to redline, and more than that, to present a totalizing vision for the manuscript at hand that perhaps the poet had missed. The hubris in this! My fear, as I see it now, was that the poets I worked with would find out that I actually had no idea what to do with their manuscripts. My received notions of what my job was entailed that I act on the text in the form of notes and cuts. But what if the poems didn’t need this kind of surgery? What if I was simply ill-equipped to see what they were seeing? I felt this way with both books, a sort of awe of their accomplishments. Both presented worlds unknown to me, and willful, complicated voices. As with all poems, theirs were tethered to deep histories, very personal ones that I knew nothing about, though reading the poems provided entry points. 

In those two cases, some of my suggestions were thought reasonable, others were ignored. Both books are among my favorites of the last decade, and both are products not of a joint vision, but of the poets’ singular visions alone. What I do think I contributed—and has been my experience working with two sets of editors on my own two books—is that I engaged with their poems. Took them seriously. Listened to the images and ideas. Hopefully provided them a sounding board of sorts, to work through their anxieties, ideas, their visions for the most important thing to them at that time: their first collection. 

And so, I have come to think of editing as just another form of engagement. Each situation demands a different form of it (and maybe I’m wrong here, in that perhaps there are manuscripts that are resistant to the kind of engagement I’ve been trying to articulate, or poets who don’t require it in order to write and publish their work). I haven’t even touched on the process of searching for and acquiring manuscripts, which is its own form of editing, especially when looking for works in translation, where the editorial work takes the form of the translator’s reckoning with and interpretation of the original text (a serious form of engagement!). Editing also requires learning to let go of assumed ideas of order, or at least, to try being as attentive as possible to what each new poem or manuscript can teach you about what you don’t yet know.