How deadheading a lilac is like making a poem
When I transcribe a poem from a notebook or recording device it's not unlike deadheading a lilac bush or rhododendron.
I shear away words, punctuation. I change line breaks. I abandon rhymes, or I see new possibilities for them.
Or perhaps you could say it’s like abandoning or just plain losing baggage at an airport.
But you have to be in a certain mood, and that mood has to be consonant with what you’re doing, and with the organism on which you’re operating. I might, for example, sing. Or I might chat, and the poems essential voices, if I’m lucky, will answer me, argue with me, and, again, if I’m lucky, prevail.
The shears must be sharp but the hand deliberate and the mind as focused as a Rotterdam diamond cutter’s.
I think this is exactly Ezra Pound’s famous service to T.S. Eliot’s fragments, fragments which in Pound’s hands became The Wasteland, that bellwether poem of the 20th Century. Eliot had come to Paris from a Swiss asylum, having suffered a breakdown, with a prosodic heap. Pound discerned the connective tissues between Eliot’s concerns and laid aside the excess baggage, which amounted to almost two thirds the original heap. It was an act as brilliant as it was ruthless. And today The Wasteland is almost a much Pound’s monument as his own Cantos.
Not every lilac or rhododendron bush fund sits Pound. He wasn't just an editor, he was a champion, and Eliot’s great good fortune.
I’ve never been so fortunate, and I think of this whenever I deadhead a bush or a poem. It is, if I let it be, an immensely humbling experience. Poems come, I think, more of humility than hubris.
There is perhaps something else that ought to be said about this analogy. You can’t wait too long to perform this procedure; if you do the plant may not be able to rally its resources next season. When the bloom dies back there’s work to do, a season to be revered, and no time to waste.