sometimes an ‘error’ is the poem’s new center
A few weeks ago, I was at a chamber music concert and a violinist’s stand collapsed with a loud thud during a Mendelson octet. The first time it fell, the musicians all tried to ignore it, acting as though a single sharp drumbeat belonged in the first movement. The second time, the piece crashed to a halt—there was an awkward silence and then all eight musicians sprang into action. They turned the moment into a delightful joke (“I’ll go find a new violinist,” the one whose stand had fallen said, “let’s not blame the equipment”). We applauded when a new stand was brought out; we shared in the anticipatory silence as the musicians reassembled. (“And the battle resumes” said another violinist, lifting his bow like a sword, and it did.) This was a much richer, more human experience than listening to a flawless recording of the same piece. The music was somehow louder and more harmonious for having contained a pocket of silence. And it got me thinking about how I respond to ‘errors’ (to actual typos or homonyms, to images or lines that seem not to fit) in my own writing.
My default strategy is often to delete or fix the error before anyone else can see it. And sometimes deleting a mistake (or ignoring it if it happens during a public performance like a reading) is the fastest and best way to handle it.
But the other way to handle a mistake is to explore it, to become an archaeologist of error and brush the dust off, study it, search for its origins, display it, and learn from it. For example, when I meant to write “mindful” but actually wrote “mine field”, I found myself reckoning with the connections between minds and fields and between thoughts and explosives. Some might call this “hanging a lantern” on the error; some might call it “writing off the subject”. I like to think of it as “digging in”—both because it’s a messy process and because it sometimes creates rabbit holes.
Digging in around an error often leads to interesting new material—sometimes even a whole new poem. An error is, after all, a kind of surprise; and, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the writer needs to be surprised in order to surprise the reader. Spotting an error and pausing to explore it takes a willingness to laugh at and with oneself, a willingness to turn a stumble into a fall into a roll. But it’s an opportunity to create a deeper, more human piece of writing. And it’s more fun than working in perfectionist mode and beating myself up for every mistake.
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