A version of Kristin Prevallet’s Lead, Glass and Poppy (LGP) which I reviewed here on 12 May, can be found in Scratch Sides, Prevallet’s book from Skanky Possum. There is a four year difference between the two books – that’s a sign of just how high my stacks of unread material have gotten – and the differences between the two editions warrant examining.

 

As before,  LGP contains two parallel texts divided by a vertical – in the Primitive Press edition, that vertical was created by the chapbook’s spine, here the two texts appear on the same page with a vertical bar. On the left, the text is more writerly & carries a ragged left linebreak. On the right, the text speaks to source materials and consciously appropriates the discursive features of journalism. (A third variant appears in the excerpt of LGP on the EPC website – the two texts without the intermediate vertical bar.) The use of end notes for the right-hand text in the Primitive Press version does not appear in the Skanky version, which trades them in for a general note about sources.

 

Two other differences are more important. The first is the elimination of stanza demarcations in the left-hand text in the Skanky LGP. Thus the later version promotes a one-page one-stanza approach, even though the “journalism” texts on the right break into stanzas when multiple elements of fact come into play.

 

Most significantly, the endings are radically different. Here is the left hand text of the later (or Skanky) version:

 

The clearing is variously inscribed

with official words

not quite innocent of all

that has been cut out.

Where the planes themselves

in time will rot

back into the sea

irreversibly, a story

that repeats itself over and over

now more than ever

as the globe shrinks closer and closer

to Eros, you

burn me

straight through to the wars

over the rumors

of wars

where a fire means

there is always an other side

that has died for one reason

or another.

 

The right-hand text is as follows:

 

There seems to be

a significant chance

that within the next

1.14 million years,

an asteroid named

433 Eros

could hit Earth,

with dire results

for the human

race and most

other species.

The sole difference between the two versions of the right-hand text is an end-note number. But the left-hand text has been substantively revised. In the earlier (or Primitive) version, it consisted of a three-stanza section on the page facing the right-hand text, plus one other entire page with a text that was centered. Here is the left-hand page of the Primitive version of LPG:

 

In the clearing we are all variously forged

with official words

not quite innocent of all

that has been broken

 

where the planes themselves

in time will rot back into to the sea

of irreversibility, that story

that repeats itself over and over

 

now more than ever as the globe shrinks

close and closer although the wars over the

rumor of wars are always the battles

left for other continents to die over.

 

Thus over four years, we see a number of substitutions:

 

forged → inscribed

broken → cut out

of irreversibility → irreversibly

although → straight through to

 

There are some subtle, but critical alterations of linebreaks as well, most notably where

 

the wars over the

rumors of wars . . .

 

has now become

 

the wars
over the rumors
of wars

 

The lineage of the Primitive LGP places the greatest emphasis on rumors, whereas the Skanky LGP emphasizes wars.

 

The ending of the two left-hand sections vary even more. The Primitive version:

 

wars are always the battles

left for other continents to die over.

 

The Skanky version:

 

where a fire means

there is always an other side

that has died for one reason

or another.

 

This is, I think, a revision of quality more than of content – the generalization of the earlier LGP has become a more specific & concrete image, a partial attempt in the poem to confront the problem of the anonymous murder of invisible Others.

 

But what are we to make the deletion of the entire final page of the Primitive version. It read

 

Rise up holy, in corsets arched

to the sun-struck heavens

 

bring news of pillage

as once a woman

naked among the ashes

 

(or that of her child)

did bend in half

and was broken before

the eyes of a mob

 

frenzied and rushed

away to the center

 

cannot hold but promises

at least to stay still

for awhile longer.

 

Presented in the same font as the “writerly” left-hand stanzas, this page thematically & graphically brings about a type of closure. As I wrote in this blog on the 12^th, this passage is “a complex & ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at the end of a complex & at least equally ambi-/multi- valent text.”

 

Its absence altogether from the Skanky version leaves us with a far more somber & pessimistic poem. Further, I read its absence as the origin of sorts for the italicized insertion that pops up in the Skanky text’s last left-hand side:

 

to Eros, you

burn me

 

Each version entails some engagement with the flesh – the Primitive version of the woman “naked among the ashes,” the Skanky one through a direct interjection to Eros – albeit one glance at the right-hand page forces us to remember that this is also (at the very least) a reference to impending collision with asteroid Eros 433.

 

The stillness which is associated with promise in the Primitive version might be read as part of what appears in that final concrete image of the Skanky edition, where it is associated now not with any respite or absence of conflict, but rather with the smoldering ruins of death. Given the timing of the two editions, one might characterize the Skanky Possum version as the post-911 version. One might read the difference between the two versions as political. If so, the former poses the possibility of the personal as a respite against the social. The latter, as I read it, counters the social with the sensual, but finds relief in neither. It is indeed the more pessimistic text.

 

In theory, of course, the later text is typically considered the “corrected” or final version. But as readers of The Prelude will know, it is the earlier published edition that sometimes survives as the one cherished by generations hence. Personally, I don’t think that one has to – or necessarily even ought to – choose one over the other. Rather, these twin texts position one of our most interesting poets at two different moments in history & that in itself is a more valuable service than playing eeny-meeny-miny-mo with these extraordinary works.