In "EditingTechnique [Special Issue]," Anna Faktorovich states, "Most writers visualize editors as the gatekeepers to the publish-or-perish academic culture. But on the other side of the fence, editors are also eager to access the best writers and works, and to sell these to the public. The uniting characteristic of the most outstanding writings is that they were all heavily edited."
Besides editing his own work with handwritten edits, Stephen Dunn also utilized editors in creating Different Hours. Stephen Dunn's Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection went through six different stages of editing before it was published, proving Anna Faktorovich's statement to be true.
This editing process followed the trajectory of:
1. Handwritten Drafts 2. Mock Up with Edits 3. First pass 4. First pass with Edits 5. Second pass 6. Third pass
The three pages within this section show the progression of this editing process of three poems from Different Hours. Each page contains one poem from Different Hours in multiple stages of the editing process to compare and contrast edits that were made. These careful edits, along with Stephen Dunn's creativity, are what allowed Different Hours to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Mock Up with edits of Different Hours title page, March, 2000
First Pass of Different Hours title page, March, 2000
First Pass with Edits of Different Hours title page, March 21, 2000
Second Pass of Different Hours publisher page, May 17, 2000
Third Pass of Different Hours title page, June 1, 2000
Final Publication of Different Hours title page, September, 2000
The following pictures are images of the editing process of the Different Hours title page from the mock up to the publication copy.
