Dear editor: When you threw out my word,
was it a word of which you’d never heard?
And how many times had you read my verse
before you made it yours and made it worse?
When you read something you don’t understand,
is your job to reduce it so you do,
or meet it on its own terms, and expand
yourself? Taste it another time or two
or three or ten: Then tell me—only then—
of what might help the poem. And I’ll write
down what you say and think about it when
I’ve long forgotten how I felt the night
I wrote the first draft and the fifty-first,
and say how wise you were, and how well-versed.
James B. Nicola is the author of six collections of poetry, the latest being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense. His decades of working in the theater culminated in the nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Guide to Live Performance, which won a Choice award.
