Years ago, while listening to the 2017 investigative podcast, S Town, I learned that the German word for “labyrinth” is “irrgarten,” which translates into English as “error garden.”
I attached to this phrase because it describes the kind of art, and especially poems, I love best: those that feel artfully constructed and controlled—gardens, what Susan Stewart calls “form wrested from nature”—but still wild, even bewildering.
Around the same time, I also discovered that part of what I wanted to do as a poet was examine error, mistake, and failure. It was the inevitable result of years spent studying poetic forms, which so often collapse in the oven like terrible, gigantic flans. My poem, “Failed Sestina,” was both a capstone of that era and a portent of many other “failed” poems to come.
Poem as “error garden” has since been a guiding metaphor for me as both writer and a reader. When I encounter a poem, I scan it looking for variations, irregularities, and imperfections. A mentor, W. Scott Howard, often says, “The escape authenticates the work,” which I’ve taken up as a creative ethos.
Another former professor comes to mind, in the art department: after throwing a frustratingly perfect vase on the wheel, he knocked it off its vertical axis by a few millimeters, a wabi-sabi approach to the craft that emphasized the beauty of the handmade.
I wrote my poem, “Beauty is made my fear,” after coming across a Laura Jensen poem with a similar hairs-width of “error” in it.
Jensen’s “Writing Your Love Down” was first published in The New Yorker in 1976 (top image). The poem reads, “Is it for the good / or for the worse that somewhere on a stage / someone is saying ‘Beauty is made by fear’?”
But the version I encountered first, on social media of all places, was that which appeared in her collection, Bad Boats, the next year (bottom image). In this version, the tenth line reads: “Is it for the good / or for the worse that somewhere on a stage / someone is saying ‘Beauty is made my fear’?”
“By” has been replaced with “my.”
Even before I recognized the possibility of two versions, the strangeness of the interjection caught my attention because it was so singular in the poem’s diction. “Beauty is made by fear” has the kind of pathos that invokes nineteenth-century philosophers, but “Beauty is made my fear” (italics mine) is something much stranger: fragmented, augmented, slippy.
I assume, perhaps wrongly, this is a misprint and not a revision (though I love the suspended ambiguity, my uncertainty). Or even, perhaps, a correction—I like imagining a reality in which the “wrong” version is “right.” But the cause of or intention behind the change is beyond the scope of this discussion. My encounter with the two versions of the poem caused me to raise an eyebrow, re-read, look for secondary and tertiary meanings.
It’s also notable that in the diegetic universe of the poem, the modified line is spoken by an actor, implying that it is a line from a play, hypothetical or otherwise. Coincidentally, it is already twice-mediated when I encounter it in the poem, as quoted material. As such, it is an occurrence of likely misprinting but also of misquoting, mispeaking.
Maybe I’ve become Jensen’s actor, saying these lines, almost exactly fifty years later, closing the loop, “for the good / or for the worse.”
Once, in a theatre class, when I was a belligerent undergrad, I misremembered Hamlet’s famous monologue about nightmares as containing the image of a “walnut shell:” “O God, I could be bounded in a [wal]nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” I was sure it existed, and I was wrong. Though I have since corrected the cognitive record, the shadow of the walnut lingers, a permanent idiolectical connotation.
Sidestepping into idea is the gesture of poetry.
I am not the first to suggest that mishearing, misspeaking, misremembering, and misquoting are generative creative practices. These experiences, of course, defamiliarize language; scramble standard grammatical structures; and impart newer, stranger ideas.
Despite my analog tendencies, I sometimes use voice dictation software at work and find interesting blips in the resulting language—phonetic misspellings, homophones, homographs, and homonyms. If you haven’t tried composing that way, I offer it as a prompt.
My personal favorite is “pubic abstract.” Do with that what you will.
Apropos, my first book, Public Abstract, was first released with two small typos in it, two missing periods where periods belonged. I don’t share this to embarrass anyone on the publication team, who were phenomenal partners. It was largely my own fault, and in the rushed minutia of literary publishing, these things happen. It was a bug, and it bugged me, but I also delighted in the irony that a book about failure, revision, and re-thinking showed a few seams.
I think Christopher Spaide hit the nail on the head when he wrote, in a review of the collection, “Public Abstract offers musical proof of the heady theory that (as Ben Lerner articulates it) ‘The poem is always a record of failure.’” Thank you, Christopher.
In my sick little imagination, an eager PhD student will, in fifty years, find a first edition of Public Abstract in a bargain bin and focus their attention on my typo with the kind of sincere curiosity I have with Jensen’s. Let me confuse the record: I did it on purpose.
The first line of my poem, “Beauty is made my fear” is: “What slips from me is what / slips from me.” It occurred to me as I was thinking about those fiddly little typos in my book: first resenting them, then accepting their inevitability, and then embracing them—“kissing” them, as the poem reads.
In truth, I started the poem long before I read “Writing Your Love Down.” I knew that line had something to offer me, so I set it aside. It sat unfinished in a word document for months.
Later, when I read the Jensen poem and discerned its version history, I immediately thought of that stray line: “What slips from me is what / slips from me,” and so I exhumed it, finally able to finish the poem. I liked how its repetition both conveyed and demonstrated a slippage, and that it had a tone of concession. It felt newly resolute. The rest of the poem tumbled out that day, and so it felt right to give the poem a title and epigraph citing Jensen’s influence.
I was already feeling ekphrastic, as a series of response poems that converse with works of literature were emerging as a major component of my second book.
That book’s title, Dilemma, became a way of thinking about the experience of creative reading, or reading as a writer. Instead of interpreting these texts, I write about experiencing them, allowing them to gear into my own subjectivity, reaping Malamud’s “flowers of afterthought.” What rises, converges: text and techne.
If I may, here at the last minute, lasso this piece back into a craft essay, I’ll leave you with a call to action: let poems, yours and others, be “error gardens.”
Notes
“Beauty is made my fear” was first published in Midway Journal in 2026 as the winner of the Actions/Words Poetry Contest, judged by Leah Umansky.
