Proof Positive... or, A Targedie of Errors

For a couple of weeks now I've been correcting proofs of the New and Selected. It's a strange experience - especially given that for so many years I couldn't bring myself to think about poems new or old. It takes a bit of an effort, like forcing yourself to look at photographs of yourself in profile, or listening to recordings of your own voice. That's not me. But oh, it very much is...

Of course some of what we're talking about are typos, misprints, literals. Mistakes I've made in the typescript sent to the publishers, mistakes that creep in as each generation of proofs are corrected. (As it happens I've been reading a lot of Dawkins, on the errors - positive, neutral, disastrous - that plague the combination and recombination of the genetic material: every round of corrections seems to enlist a new cadre of mistakes.)

But more interesting are the things you suddenly see, the outrageous errors (of judgement, as much as anything) that have been hiding in plain sight all these years - and some of these poems are almost 40 years old. It's hard to accept that I ever thought that an exclamation mark was acceptable in a poem, for fuck's sake. And there are the poems you wouldn't write, or write in the same way, today. Misjudgements of phrasing or form that you either accept or abandon. These things of darkness...

I'm lucky to have had friends and readers who've helped pull the selection together. Most of the real dross has been jettisoned, I hope. At least, there's nothing in Belfast from Space that I can't live with. Well, except for one poem, maybe, but it's too late now.

Nevertheless, it's a struggle not to revise, correct, improve, recast. I've added and removed commas, italicised and romanised the same words again and again. Cut. Stet. Cut. But that's not the job, today, is it? These poems are as done as they'll ever be. Step away from the keyboard.

On the positive side, re-reading all these poems, over and over, in their new, boiled-down context, brings out echoes and consistencies, patterns of recurrence and reflection, that I hadn't noticed before. I like to think I've approached some kind of coherence. Or maybe I've just been repeating myself since 1986. (But then, I hear Mark E Smith snarl: 'It's not repetition, it's discipline.')

And there are those odd little discoveries and epiphanies: so that's what that poem's about. Why has it taken all these years to understand my own poem? Do I understand any of this?

Well, it's done now. In a matter of days, really, the book will be out in the world. And I know that I'll open my author's copy, flick through randomly, and alight on a screamingly obvious typo that will ruin my threadbare reputation and my life.