An Open Book

This is an open book in two senses of the term. It is open because it is a work in progress. Over the years I have tinkered with most of these poems many times and have revised some of them quite thoroughly. Their publication here does not mean I am done with them. Yet there are some poems which I have not altered in years, not because they are perfect, but because they reflect my intention at the time I wrote them. Just because I have changed into a different man with the passage of years does not mean I should expunge the traces of my earlier self that these poems represent. So this open book is a collection of the poems I happened to choose for publication at this time, in the form I happen to prefer at the moment. This book is open in another sense, however. Since the days of Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, poetry has been steadily dying as a public art form, because poets, taught to value obscurity and difficulty, have labored to make their verse less and less accessible to untrained readers. I see little point in creating verse that has no readers except a tiny club who have learned a private code. Anyone can be obscure -- all you have to do to achieve obscurity is to write incompetently. To be clear and yet also say something worth saying is what I believe poets should strive for. The first reading should reward the reader. If later readings reveal new insights, so much the better; but if the first reading did not achieve Drydens recipe of sweetness and light, why should a reader return for a second pass?

Orson Scott Card The Subterranean Press edition of An Open Book.