It's brazen of me to mention myself in the same paragraph with Walt Whitman, let alone in the same sentence, but I've discovered we have something in common—the habit of forever rewriting what we long ago thought finished. Thirty-five years after he first published it, Whitman was still rewriting and adding to his Leaves of Grass, just as I, ever since its inception, have been rewriting and adding to my Rewritten Rewrites.

Already this morning, I’ve rewritten the last two sentences of a piece I first wrote ten years ago, rearranged a sentence in a more recent piece and, in another old one, reinserted a comma I removed yesterday and replaced "stirring" with "rousing". And I’ve just rewritten the last sentence of this introduction.

I know—this obsessive rewriting hardly qualifies me to share a sentence with the great Walt Whitman, but, splashing about here in the shallows, I can’t help taking heart from glimpses of myself in the big boys. And Whitman isn’t my first—I’ve just as brazenly shared sentences with Ernest Hemingway, Leonard Cohen, E. B. White and, as an artist, with Alex Colville (among other things, we shared a passion for the Audi Roadster). I'm working toward being brazenly mentioned, myself, in the same sentence with. Here’s where I’ve gotten to—

procrastinations   pass the pie

Elizabeth Gish   man at the door   safety tip

the flood   Meredith   Frank & Emma

speaking of elephants   sinful music   about my neck

willow pillow armadillo   no kisses today

no surprise   change of heart   Angela

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