Last time around I walked you through my revision process for “As I Write This,” before it was published. As you’ll see in this post, I didn’t stop revising the poem once it was published. It’s something I do all the time—a perfectionist tic, I guess—though it’s rarely anything more than a waste of time. Once “As I Write This” entered the world my revision process took a sort of desperate turn, before I decided I didn’t want the poem to exist anymore and I gave up.   I sent my fourth draft of “As I Write This” to Sink Review, who published it in March 2013. At that point I had recently taken up the practice of emailing links to newly published work to people (those I know personally, at least) whose names appear in a piece, along with those who I thought about while writing it. Though I composed an email for “As I Write This,” even after Sink put the piece online I still didn’t send out the link. For months I’d see the subject “As I Write This” in my draft folder and I’d think, “Oh I should send that out,” but I never did. It’s hard now to not see my procrastination as a symptom of my sense of failure—like I already knew the poem failed before its failure was “confirmed” for me socially.   (I put scare quotes around “confirmed” because I’m resistant to the idea that the responses the poem generated determined its failure—even though it was through processing the responses that I came to feel the poem failed.)   It took about five or six months before anyone talked to me about the poem. During those months—last spring—I received a lot of responses, both positive and negative, to “The New York School.” Processing those responses gave me fuel for writing two other prose pieces, “David Wojnarowicz at the Movies” and one called “The Poet” (which is still unfinished). Then sometime last September I got a phone call from my friend Jordan Stempleman.   I can always count on Jordan to be straightforward with me. It’s one of the things that makes him a true prince. Since I started publishing poems with lots of names, Jordan has consistently plied me with questions of the ethical implications of naming, of writing about living people publicly—and of my iffy taste level. He characterized the gossipy aspects of my work as “locker room talk” (which amuses me since I’ve never been anything close to a jock).   With this phone call, Jordan reported that I had hurt someone—a close friend of his, an old acquaintance of mine—with the line “I don’t care about you James Tate.” Jordan, I think, felt torn. One of his friends was hurt by another, and he was left with a feeling of discord. I felt bad. Though I’m not the best at pleasing others with my work, I don’t want to hurt anyone. It’s not my intention. After talking to Jordan my Freshman Composition Teacher Voice kicked in and asked some basic questions: OK Joseph, why don’t you care about James Tate? How does your lack of care manifest itself? Describe it. Be specific.     But it isn’t worth describing because the line doesn’t do much. And it doesn’t do much because it doesn’t go there. As a thought it’s about as fully formed as a gangly teenager’s beard. The part of the poem with the line was this:   when you close your eyes and you fall asleep I don’t care about you James Tate you’ll be forgotten, mom and brother and father, my dead brother and my brother and my brother and me   This was sloppy—literally careless—as the carelessness seeped past James Tate into all those who follow—my family and myself—and by extension everyone named in the poem. It undermined that sense of our essential loneliness—a loneliness we all have because we know we’ll be forgotten eventually. Which is to say it infused the beautiful silence of forgetting, of nonexistence—something that should be a source of comfort—with a bleak sense of alienation.   As I consider this part of “As I Write This,” I keep thinking about a certain passage from “The New York School.” Judging from the flecks of gossip I heard, from conversations and emails, I’d say the passage seemed to offend just about everyone I know (and others I don’t). But, comparing it to the James Tate line in “As I Write This,” I feel the passage does its job because it does go there—and that was my task in “The New York School.” Here’s the passage:   “I often wonder about the flirtations between Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, when Berrigan was visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers Workshop and Notley was so young and full of admiration for the wily New York poet. She must have wanted so badly to be part of the poetic life of New York City, to be filled with the breath and babies of this poet named Ted, who was 11 years her senior, and Berrigan I’m sure loved fucking Notley (they were both Scorpios) and he loved knowing Notley would probably cook him dinner and she’d listen to all his new poems afterward as if she’s hearing the true secrets of the pope’s depravity. Iowa is directly in the middle of the country, and when I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop—that’s right, I really went there—one day Mark Levine performed a close reading of “The Day Lady Died,” and Mark kept repeating the line “I don’t know the people who will feed me” as if it was the most profound thing O’Hara ever wrote, and I sat there wondering if Mark would be a better poet if instead of fucking Jorie Graham he got fucked by Ted Berrigan and most poets don’t have a vision, but I do, it’s clear and conflicted and it’s radiantly directionless.”   Brett Price, responding in ON, called me out for my poor taste and implied that my writing “The New York School” was motivated by a sense of envy. I do not deny my bad taste—I think it’s getting worse as I age, actually, and this only makes me feel more like myself. It makes me feel good. Like the whole world’s my well-tailored suit (and I’m wearing the same pair of dildo panties beneath it for the fifth day in a row). As to the issue of envy, I think it’s too easy to assume that that’s what motivates one poet’s negative depiction of another. It’s an assumption that lacks imagination—and imagination is what I’m asking of my audience. Isn’t that what any of us are asking for?   I want to say to Brett directly: I was very touched by your piece, by its care, and I think that you deserve more of a response than this. That will come.*   In Anna Vitale’s performance for the Brooklyn Poetry Summit this past weekend, she started off her reading by saying that she thinks more of us should be talking about our shame publicly. I totally agree. If we imagine shame, if we include it in the spectrum of what we imaginatively project—it can only aid our necessary transformations. It’s too common, too safe, and too boring to defer to tastefulness. There are no stakes in tastefulness—unless you’re more interested in generating capital (social, or otherwise) than in activating transformation. And isn’t that what we all set out to do—to transform ourselves? Why else would anyone bother with something as ridiculous as poetry? The longer I do it, the more I feel it’s truly the lowest of all the arts—and there’s nothing romantic in being the lowest. But, for those of us lingering down here, poetry can be a real space for the transformation of our various senses of guilt, fear, hatred, shame, confusion—stuff like that. The shit. The social element to this shit is key, in that we learn how to transform ourselves by reading and talking to our idols and teachers and friends. And that’s what I addressed in “The New York School”—I named idols and teachers and friends. I was the pupil spelling out what I had learned from them.     I wrote “The New York School” about six months after “As I Write This”—though the former was published first. Now it’s clear to me that “As I Write This” was just a warm-up, I was on the way to something else. Which is why, after my conversation with Jordan, when I started revising “As I Write This” again, I was fucking up. I was trying to “fix” something that was gangly, ugly, maybe boring—but it wasn’t broken.   Over the next several months (between September and December) I ground the poem down, in several drafts, to a single squeaky and emaciated page. Whatever thought was embodied from that first moment over a year earlier, sitting on my bed with “For Kate I Wait,” spacing out with my notebook, was gone. Meaning: I lost touch with the original impulse of the poem. What started off as a process of listing names and associations of those names—a pretty simple action, really—became mired in bad feeling. I hated seeing certain names in the poem. It’s a danger of using names, or of writing about people in general: things change, people change, relationships change. I wanted “As I Write This” to change too.   Not long after I talked to Jordan I got a phone call from someone else who didn’t like seeing their name in the poem. So I took it out. Then I started taking out all kinds of things—anything negative, anything associated with the excised names. The poem was shrinking, crippled. It just so happens that the second person who called teaches in the same classroom I do. A couple weeks after our phone conversation, when I got to class I noticed a diagram on the board, leftover from their class. The center of the diagram read NAMES, with arrows pointing outward to various attributes of names and naming. One of the arrows pointed to the phrase: “some people just ruin names.” The diagram stayed on the board for the rest of the semester, as I ripped apart “As I Write This.”   Of course, all of this was happening in private as the poem was up on the internet for anyone to see. I was chopping the poem up, cutting lines, rewriting it by hand. I thought for a while that the real reason it didn’t work was that it was meant to be a handwritten poem, a little piece of wilderness. But after writing it out in my madman scrawl again, it became clear that my scrawling was a method—not a style. Then, just a few days before this past Christmas, I received another phone call about the poem—this one from my ex-landlord, whose full name and address were in the poem.   Unsure at first about why my ex-landlord was calling, he started telling a longwinded story about a relationship of his that just ended. The reason, he said, is that the woman he was seeing was convinced that he was a philanderer, that he was staging orgies in his building—so she dumped him. While he was telling me this, I started to remember the following lines (which I’ve censored here) from “As I Write This”:   and I haven’t heard CA having sex upstairs in a while, I can hear DB and Kristen and Isabel and Iris and Jamie everybody else is having sex at XXX Irving Ave Brooklyn New York 1123X   Oh. All my neighbors—whose sexy times I had overheard at various points in the three years I lived in that building, with its super thin walls—were actually having an orgy to my ex-landlord’s now ex-girlfriend, and this was evidence. Whoops. That was certainly not an effect I imagined this poem would have. Though I can see how she read it that way—the grammar suggests it.   My ex-landlord asked that I change his name and take out the address. But that was it for me. I was done. That very moment I wrote to Dan and Steve at Sink Review and asked them to take down the poem, which they did the next day.   So, there we have the sad history of “As I Write This.” In my final post I will share the list I promised—all the reasons I’ve thought over the past four months of why the poem failed. Thank you and see you soon!   - JOSEPH BRADSHAW Joseph Bradshaw is a poet, educator, and archivist. He is the author of several chapbooks, as well as the full-length In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books). He curates a readings series at Berl’s Poetry Shop in Brooklyn called Leslie Flint Presents, and is at work on a book about the afterlife of the New York School.   * I could write something like what I’m doing now with “Total Fail” for “The New York School”—a poem whose process was quite different from “As I Write This.” Maybe I’ll call it “Totally Fucked,” or “The Shittiest and Best Shamefulness of My Still-Learning Heart, by Joseph Bradshaw.”