CONCLUSIONS THAT NEVER CONCLUDE

freeimages.com/Vic Zagranowski "If you don't like what you wrote, don't think about the words, just remember it better." I'm paraphrasing Robert Hass's advice on revision in a dimly-recalled Vimeo of a talk given in Rotterdam , a paraphrase itself of something Jack Kerouac once said. The context was a discussion of the sources of poetry according to Rilke (memory, dream, art) and its subjects (joy, longing, grief). Hass had set up a quick exercise in noting a location for each of those emotions. Just before this, someone in the audience asked about revision, to which Hass responded with an anecdote (about Robert Duncan and his poem " My Mother Would Be a Falconress ") that suggested a poem only acquires the name 'poem' when all the writing is done, essentially another way of saying writing is rewriting is writing. I recall, as a young person just beginning to find my own poems, asking a friend about her process and how she knew when a poem