Editors & Sailors

By: HILOBROW
August 30, 2011

HiLobrow contributor Mark Kingwell — always a contrarian — praises editors, of all people, in a CBC Books essay today. Well, good editors, to be precise. He says:

Good editors save you from yourself. They help you kill your darlings, as Faulkner put it: anything cute, slick, sentimental, or too clever by half. I try not to look back on my published work — doing so tends to generate rapid flashes of shame (“I can’t believe I wrote that”) and equally shameful vanity (“Not so bad, actually”) — but if I ever find myself indulging it, my most frequent thought is: I wish I had listened to so-and-so when he/she said to blueline that bit of tricksy guff.

Meanwhile, the magazine Linebreak published a poem by HILOBROW’s Matthew Battles today. It begins like so:

      I took my place among the men
and lessoned to their conversation —
their talk of clews and halliards
and all their catalogues and lists
of ropes and running gear and sails
slablines spankers brail and outhall —
then I showed them magic lantern slides
of kangaroos and horses on the plains.

No tricksy guff in evidence!

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