Rough Draft
Sept 3 2014


If I am to be charitable
toward the first half of my life
I will see it not as failure, or waste
but as a rough draft.

The fearlessness
of the first word, on a blank page.
The blind canyons
I stumbled into
and back-tracked out.
Whole paragraphs, excised
with heavily-inked lines,
like badly chosen lovers
and disappointed wives.

The sanitized version
I present to the world
papers over the bad,
like a great metropolis
built on the ruins
of cities past.
Layer upon layer
of clay tablets, vellum manuscripts,
first editions
inscribed by hand.
Of ledgers and lists
and scribbled scraps.

Should I rip the whole thing up,
re-invent myself
learn from the past?
Or is change impossible,
and the rough drafts, I've diligently saved
the map I follow
over-and-over again?

Yellowing sheets

riddled with chicken-scratch,
that preserve the history
of the creative act.
Do they detract
from the appearance of effortlessness?
Or do they show just how hard it is;
what an accomplishment
to have simply lived?


I was reading a column by Elizabeth Renzetti (I think in the Sept 1 2014 Globe and Mail) about how we should reframe the concept of failure: that it should celebrated, instead of stigmatized and concealed, since most success is built on failure; and that we should consciously teach kids how to fail well, instead of fearfully protecting their presumably frail self-esteem. Because -- in the spirit of "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" -- protecting them makes them less resilient, not more.

There was a line that went something like "we should regard our failures as rough drafts": necessary steps on the way to success. As a writer, this idea of the rough draft struck a chord with me, and I thought "...well, why not regard the whole first half of my life as a rough draft, and use it to start over, do better?" Certainly no reason not to, if it's as easy as balling up a piece of paper and tossing it in the trash -- which I do, all the time. ...Unfortunately, it turns out that changing the habits of a lifetime, let alone one's temperament and personality, are a lot harder than re-writing a line of poetry! (And not to mention that if it's literally the first "half", I'm destined to live to the ripe old age of 118!)

I also recently read (in a piece by Adrienne La France, in the on-line Atlantic Weekly of Aug 31 2014) about a fellow (Paul Moran) who for years compulsively rifled through John Updike's garbage (set out at the curb for collecting), and was able to preserve rough drafts that would otherwise have been lost (among lots of other ephemera -- shopping lists mixed in with rare manuscripts!), with all their telling insertions and crossed-out lines and marginal comments. I love that kind of artifact. It gives unparalleled insight not only into the creative act, but into the application and craft that go into making a masterful piece of writing appear effortless. It's always encouraging to another writer to see the clumsy first attempt at what would eventually become a famous and oft-quoted line.

I write first drafts, as well as the initial revisions, in pen on paper. But subsequent editing is done with screen and keyboard, so all the intermediate steps are unrecoverable. I sometimes keep the rough draft, though. I admit this sheepishly, because for what other reason would I do such a thing except out of a hubristic sense of posterity: as if I had in mind my literary biographer in some hypothetical future. (Note to literary biographer: I think they've all by now been lost!)

It was the conflation of these two streams of thought -- the saved ephemera of a famous writer's life, the exalted status of the rough draft -- that led me to this poem.

I should make clear that there are no "wives"; or wife, for that matter. As always, this is not auto-biography. Actually, my life regrets mostly concern the things I haven't done. This is understandable, in my case: I've tended to live quietly, to be more of an observer than an actor, and to have missed some of the assumed rites of passage and developmental stages that are common landmarks in more conventional lives. But I think regret over failures of omission rather than commission is the rule. Because the tendency with a hypothetical choice is to visualize an idealized outcome; while the choices we actually made have measurable and known outcomes. When you're measuring yourself against perfection, it's hard to win.

My 10th grade teacher referred to my penmanship as "chicken-scratch". My handwriting, as is usually the case, has degenerated even further as I've aged. So this bastardized version of cursive and printed is all me, the caution about auto-biography notwithstanding!

The penultimate stanza refers to the difficulty of change. But the final stanza responds to that with a kind of self-acceptance: if not using failure as an engine of change, at least acknowledging it, taking ownership, trying not to repeat mistakes. (Although to have "simply lived", admittedly, sets a very low bar: as if basic survival were enough!)

I had the inspired thought of taking a picture of the first rough draft of this poem. I think it came out legibly enough. (Actually, the bad light and high contrast help: it has the look of something archival and almost iconic, of a fluid thing -- thought -- unexpectedly fixed; the way I reacted seeing Lincoln's scribbled and roughly corrected draft of Gettysburg.) I've included it here: a chance -- as that old reliable exam question has it -- to "contrast and compare" the original with the finished version. There is no rough draft of this blurb, however: it was written directly onto the computer, and all its revisions have long since disappeared into the black hole of cyberspace. (Where I'm sure they happily co-exist with lost socks and unlucky pennies!)