Thursday, August 6, 2009

Easy Green Proof Part 3

Further editorial changes were made in the third part of the poem. I corrected the misspelled (or spelled with an obscure variant) "harnassed" to "harnessed" and changed

Were first spoken in the presence
Of Napoleon, the original Muhammed Ali,

to

Were first spoken in the presence
Of the emperor,

because although I liked the anachronism of calling Napoleon the original Muhammed Ali (referring when I wrote to the boxer) I realized I hadn't been conscious when I wrote of the additional anachronism of the original Muhammed Ali maybe having some relevance to Egypt's history around the time the Rosetta Stone got lifted -- and not wanting to mix it up with that, and wanting to distance the quotation of Laplace a little more, I simplified.

Next, I replaced

For him who first read and therefore

with

For him who first perused and thereby

-- I think both of the word changes are improvements, have more energy and work better with the idea of unintentionally inventing the logarithmic novel, whatever that might be (some logarathmically compressed form of narrative, I guess).

And finally, whether deliberately or not (I don't remember at the moment) the last lines of the section were changed from

You know, it comes
From not travelling around the world

to

You know, it comes,
From not travelling around the world

The original lines were very much my thinking at the time I wrote about my regrets at having dropped out of Johnston College the semester before I'd dreamed of going on the big group trip to Europe that a lot of my other college friends went on. So maybe excising the autobiographical material, making it less pointed, and inserting the comma at the end of the penultimate line so that the muddled syntax mixes more with the preceding lines, was an appropriate, even if unintentional, purification of the poem.


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