April was poetry month: winners and wrap up

31 revisions

Reader, National Poetry Month has passed us by. I’m excited to announce the winners of free poetry Margo Roby and Tara Rae Mulroy. Thanks to everyone who threw their name in the hat.

I know many poets who are heaving a sigh of relief this morning — no mandate to write a poem today. As for me, I counted up my revisions for the month of April and ended up with 31 (sometimes the Muse strikes in revision mode, you know; I never pass up a date with the Muse, so I did one extra). The thing I love about a poem-a-day (or, in my case, a revision-a-day) challenge is that it reminds us that having a focus can lead to real results. For April, my first priority after my morning reading and writing was revision. With the exception of one or two poems that are still knocked out on the operating table, I now have a stack of poems that are ready for the spit and polish. The one-a-day rate, whether drafting or revising, isn’t sustainable over a long period of time, but it’s good to make a push every now and then, isn’t it?

In other news, I’m very happy to have learned that my poem “Aubade For Peter Pan” received an honorable mention in the Tupelo Press Winter 2012 Poetry Project. You can read my poem and many other wonderful poems at this website.

From the Keeping It Real desk, we have news of a rejection or two and a grant proposal passed over. I’ve found that, over time, my skin is thickening. For one thing, I don’t expect to win anything the first time I try. For another, I’ve learned that submissions are, to a certain extent, a numbers game — the more you submit the more publications you’ll have. Sadly, I’ve submitted very little since January (must remedy! must remedy!). It helps, too, when the rejections are the good kind of rejection wherein one is asked to submit more work. Little nudges from the universe that say: Poet, persevere! And I shall.

Lastly a big thank you to Diane Lockward, who included links to my revision tips in the May edition of her poetry newsletter. If you aren’t receiving this newsletter, may I recommend that you sign up here (scroll down — the sign-up field is in the right hand margin). Every month Diane provides a book recommendation, a craft tip, and many useful poetry links. It’s a great resource for the working poet. Thanks again, Diane!

And now, Reader, May is Moving Month. It’s true. Currently the wee, small house is shrouded in a red tent and lethal gas — termites are a fact of life in this subtropical climate, and most houses are fumigated when they change hands. Husband asked me if I took a picture. Um, no. No, I don’t want a reminder that my house was filled with lethal gas and the entry sealed for three days. I suppose I’d better issue unto myself a box-a-day challenge. Yeah. We’ll see how that goes.

Happy end of poetry month, happy May Day, and happy Tuesday to all of you. Thanks, as always, for reading.

friday roundup: more on working parents, naporevmo update, and Night-Pieces

photo from Spirit Rover; public domain from NASA via wikimedia

Happy Friday, all. I “slept in” — it’s already 5:30 — so let’s begin the roundup without further adieu:

more on working parents  We had quite a discussion on parenthood and work earlier this week. I enjoyed hearing from everyone who commented — thanks. My sister-in-law and I were talking about it more and we agreed that no matter how you choose to be family, there is always some ambivalence and uncertainty — are we doing this right? And it’s always hard and exhausting (though not without a joyful element). Also, parenting brings one into daily confrontation with one’s flaws and imperfections. When one is feeling ambivalent, flawed and exhausted, it’s all too easy to try to justify one’s own choice by denigrating those who’ve made a different choice. Perhaps I should’ve added one more article to the treaty: let us all attempt to live peacefully in the mess of it.

I also heard from people who have chosen not to have children, who receive their fair share of comments and insults because of that choice. Corollary to Article 4: we will honor the life choices of all people, parents or not.

naporevmo update  Those who have been reading along know that I set a goal for myself to accomplish one revision a day during national poetry month. I’m happy to say I’ve kept up so far. The hardest part has been leaving one poem for the next — revision could be an infinite process, no? The thing I haven’t kept up on is submissions. I’ve sent out only a handful of packets since the first of the year. Perhaps that can be my next pledge to myself — a submission a day for May?

Night-Pieces And speaking of putting children to bed, and feeling our flaws and imperfections, and ambivalence about our choices, here is a poem by Adrienne Rich from Necessities of Life. In my reading of this poem, mother and child become actors in the bad dreams of the other — not much of a stretch for any parent “swaddled in a dumb dark”:

Night-pieces: For a Child

1. The Crib

You sleeping I bend to cover.
Your eyelids work. I see
your dream, cloudy as a negative,
swimming underneath.
You blurt a cry. Your eyes
spring open, still filmed in a dream.
Wider, they fix me –
–death’s head, sphinx, medusa?
You scream.
Tears lick my cheeks, my knees
droop at your fear.
Mother I no more am,
but woman, and nightmare.

2. Her Waking

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark
hourless as Hiroshima,
almost hearing you breathe
in a cot three doors away.

You still breathe, yes –
and my dream with its gift of knives,
its murderous hider and seeker,
ebbs away, recoils

back into the egg of dreams,
the vanishing point of mind.
All gone.

But you and I –
swaddled in a dumb dark
old as sickheartedness,
modern as pure annihilation –

we drift in ignorance.
If I could hear you now
mutter some gentle animal sound!
If milk flowed from my breast again…

Reader, that’s it for today’s roundup. Happy Friday, happy weekend, and may all your dreams be happy ones. Thanks for reading!

friday roundup: to carry over, a house at a crossroad, and doing the opposite thing

Róng manuscript image from wikimedia

Reader, today it’s taking every ounce of me to do my own work first. With the help of a few closed doors (hiding unmade beds, piles of dirty laundry, and the like) and some encouragement from my wonderful mother, I am here at my desk to bring you this week’s roundup:

to carry over  I used to have a good memory. Then I had children. So, I forgot to share one of my favorite radical revision strategies. I call it translate/retranslate/mistranslate. The idea comes from the poet Nina Lindsay who has written several poems as “mistranslations” of other poems (usually Chinese, I think). I don’t know enough about Lindsay’s process to say anything about it, but here’s what I do sometimes when I’m stuck on a poem: Select the text and paste it into the “from” box on Google translate. Choose a language to translate it into and translate it, then repeat the process to retranslate it back to English. Based on the retranslation (which is also probably a mistranslation, at least in some lines), grab a phrase, and/or willfully mistranslate a phrase to move you into the next version of your poem. The word translate comes from the Latin for “to go beyond” (trans) and “to carry over” (latus). Sometimes this trick helps me to go beyond my current ideas for a draft, while carrying over at least a ghost of the original poem.

a house at a crossroad  And speaking of Nina Lindsay, here is one of her mistranslations — a stunner of a poem. I’m sure I’ve shared this poem before (maybe on my old blog), but it’s one of my favorite poems of all time, so I’ll share it again.

the opposite thing This week, I’ve been reading Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America’s Poets. It’s a book comprised of transcripts from a poetry seminar led by Pearl London at the New School. Working poets such as Maxine Kumin, Robert Hass, Amy Clampitt and many others, came to the seminar with current drafts and discussed their drafting and revision processes, as well as their ideas about their own work and poetry in general. I’m really loving this book, and learning a lot. Right now, I’m reading the 1979 session with Louise Gluck (pardon my lack of umlaut). One of Gluck’s assertions is that “as soon as you can place yourself (in a certain category of poetry or poetics) –well, as soon as I can place myself and describe myself–I want immediately to do the opposite thing” (parentheses mine). She says she wanted to find out what kind of poems she could write when her “habitual devices were refused.”

I was also very interested in her discussion of fragmentation and the use of white space. She talks about white space as a way “to use silence to… almost… if you can properly frame an image or a verbal gesture in white space, in silence, you can make of that whole movement something equivalent to a single word; that is, the way a word, a contained word, explodes into meaning. It’s like those little Japanese stones that you drop into water. They become flowers. That’s a metaphor very attractive to me — the idea that something small should ramify.” I’ve never thought of white space in quite those terms, but now I will.

I recommend, con mucho gusto, Poetry in Person to the poets in the readership. It has helped me to notice things I might not have in others’ poems, and inspired me to try new things, i.e., refuse habitual devices, in my own. Sometimes is very freeing to work against type.

And speaking of working against type, I’m going to return to my own work now. I’m going to work against the June Cleaver type inside me, who wants swept floors, perfectly made beds, and plenty of T.P. in reserve.

Which, when (mis)translated by Google Translate, means: “June, the ax inside me, who is not willing to sweep the floors, or perfect beds. A large number of T.P. in the reserve.”

I swear I didn’t make that up!

on revision: surgery, funhouse mirrors, and abandoning ship. or, the radical.

Honorary poetry foremother Anna Starr Brunwald, the first woman to perform open heart surgery. Photo source here.

Dear Reader, is it just me or has this little series on revision taken forEVER? Yes, well, that’s the way of revision it seems. So here we go again. This is the final, and, I fear, somewhat anticlimactic post about revision in which we’ll discuss “the radical.” I’ve labeled the following revision strategies “radical” because they seem that way to me, and indeed, my heart beats fast and I want to run for cover when I think of attempting some of them. You may find these run-of-the-mill, but I’ll share them anyway for what it’s worth. If you’re just joining us, you can find links to previous installations of this series at the bottom of this post.

Okay. Deep breath.

revise toward the strange  I’m starting out slowly, here. This is a tip Traci Brimhall wrote about on HerCircle. I’m a little torn about whether we should all revise toward the strange or not. It’s definitely a fit for what I know of Brimhall’s work, but perhaps your poems tend in another direction and you’d be better off revising toward the understated, the haunted, or the spicy. At any rate, the idea is to revise with a flavor (for lack of a better word) in mind — the flavor a particular poem requires to become most effective, the flavor this section of your manuscript requires, etc. Keeping a flavor in mind can help us avoid making small, relatively meaningless changes and calling it revision.

open heart surgery  (my heart is pounding)  Have any of your children ever needed surgery? One of mine has. It’s, well, gut-wrenching. Especially when they tell you the procedure will take 15 minutes but 45 minutes later you’re still sitting there waiting to hear that the surgery’s over. At any rate, it can be hard to think of gassing your poems and putting them under the knife, too. Which is why you should tread gingerly when you try either of the following approaches: 1) split the poem down the breastbone (ouch!) This is a strategy from Poets&Writers The Time is Now series of writing prompts. You split the poem in the middle, then write a new first half to go with the original second half, and a new second half to go with the original first half. 2) fracture the poem (warning: involves scissors). The idea is to cut your poem into chunks, then take a few of them and think about formal rearrangements, cutting altogether, changing the order, fragmenting the lines, etc. Once I did this with a partner and she cut my poem into so many pieces it was impossible to put back together in any way shape or form. I may be scarred for life; I have never gone back to that poem. So, if you’re going to do this, the key is to “cut wherever you can leave a fragment that seems to contain some resonance” (this is a quote from the author of the exercise, Chase Twichell, from the book he co-edited, The Practice of Poetry). Sometimes the actual physical separation of lines can help us see what we don’t see by just circling blocks of text and drawing arrows all over the page of a draft.

resurrection  Remember the orphanage for darlings? Or perhaps, like most of us, you have a file of failed poems? This strategy calls for going back to one of your darlings or failed poems, taking a line that feels interesting or important or as closely linked in subject area or meaning to the draft you’re revising, and to use that harvested line as the first line of the next draft of your poem. This is a variation of a revision exercise that also came from The Practice of Poetry.

have triplets  (insert deer in the headlights look here)  For the poem you’re trying to revise, write one of each of the following versions: 1) the opposite poem — opposite both in diction and in subject (e.g., “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers–” morphed into “despair’s leaden / limbs…”) 2) the fun-house mirror reflection of your poem — a distorted, wild, upside-downy version of your poem (this one came from Sandy Longhorn’s blog — thanks Sandy), and 3) the ghost of your poem — what your poem would say if it came back to haunt the world.

don’t look a gift-poem in the mouth It happens every once in a blue moon, right? You hear this voice in your head. It’s saying “fingering the key to a door you turned / your back on.” It’s saying, “settle gently over her skin when / moonlight blesses window.” Its saying a whole poem, line after line. You’re racing for your pen and notebook. You’re scribbling the words down fast as they come. You’re in an other-worldly state — under the spell of the voice, only transcribing. You’re the recipient of a gift-poem. Reader, I know it hardly ever happens, but every now and then a poem comes out whole and is very good and doesn’t need to be revised. There’s no reason to spend time fiddling (or performing surgery) if your intuition says the poem came out whole. I’ve had this happen maybe four times in the last eight years. The gift-poem should still spend its time in the resting drawer and should get the spit and polish. But don’t bend over backwards in the acrobats of genuine revision. Instead, get down on your knees and thank the Muse, God, the Universe, the Academy, your mother, your cat, and whoever else you want to thank. Then, move on to the next draft.

abandon ship  Does this sound the worst of all? What I mean is simply to give up. That’s right, I said give up. Maybe even forever. There are some drafts that are just not going anywhere. This is part of the writing and creative life. It’s okay to say, “I don’t think I’m ever going to get this one right, and I’m done trying.” Of course, if you’re an optimistic soul, you’ll want to put it in your file of failed poems in case you want to try resurrecting it one day.

So, that’s the radical, Reader. Do you have any radical revision strategies? If yes, please share them in the comments. I’ve enjoyed this conversation on revision, and I’ve learned (or re-learned) a lot just by gathering all my revision tips and strategies under one roof. Which reminds me, I should do the same for my socks.

And, if you need them, here are the links to the other parts in the series:

Parts 1 and 1.5 (scroll down) – the philosophical
Part 2 – the usual
Part 3 – the useful

Reader, happy halfway-through-poetry-month, and happy re-vision to you.

on revision: darlings, poetry hairballs, getting better gas mileage, and surgery. or, the useful.

I realize using a butterfly is a tired cliche but cut me some slack it's five in the morning. Public domain from wikimedia.

There’s a quote that’s important in my life. It goes like this:

“The most important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

This quote comes to us from W.E.B Du Bois, and I think it’s a good quote to keep in mind in life and in revision. Not that I am always very good at it. The giving up can be scary in both realms. But if we think of life and writing as a journey of exploration, it becomes easier to open ourselves (and our poems) to new and different possibilities.

For revision, we think of it this way: The most important thing is to be ready at any moment to give up what your poem is for what it might become. Here are some ways of exploring possibilities that have been particularly helpful to me in the journey of revision:

the orphanage for darlings  You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it: kill all your darlings. In other words, get rid of the lines and phrases you’re head-over-heels in love with. But here’s the thing: some of the darlings are worth keeping, if not in your draft, then on a page at the back of your notebook. This is a trick: your heart breaks a little less if you know you can keep that darling somewhere. And you never know… you might get to use some of the darlings in future poems. I’ve had that happen more than once.

revise in waves  I’m pretty sure I got this tip from Sandy Longhorn’s blog (thank you Sandy). Revising in waves just means to structure your revision around craft elements: today I’m going to look at verbs (or linebreaks, or vowel sounds). I’ve also found it helpful to group poems that belong together into waves for revision. For example, I’ve grouped all the mail order bride poems together for revision in order to capture her voice again across the set of poems.

free-write or journal about the poem  I suppose this could be thought of as meta-revision. When I’m stuck on a poem, I’ll often grab what feels like an important line and use it to begin a free-write, repeating that line whenever I get stuck in the free-write. I’ve also journaled about what’s important in a draft, or why I wrote a draft, or what I think the poem wants to become. Stream of consciousness is important here. Both of these strategies have helped me to get un-stuck during revision.

hammer it into a form This advice comes to us from Maxine Kumin, who wrote about this strategy in her introduction to her po-friend, Anne Sexton’s, Complete Poems. You will be amazed at what the constraints of a form can draw forth. Even just hammering a draft into rhyming couplets can get you past a revision roadblock. Try sonnets, pantoums, ghazals (which seem easy, but then they’re not, right?). You may, in the end, abandon the form — but you may also get that one phrase, image, or string of vowels you need for the next version of the poem.

use etymology  Use an etymology dictionary to learn more about the origins of key words in the poem. Many times, this trick has helped me to figure out how to hone the poem’s language for a purpose. Many other times, it has helped me to figure out that I needed to drop one word or another. My favorite etymology dictionary is The Barnhart Concise, but this online site is a fine place to start.

get there quicker  I can’t remember now where I learned this trick. But here’s what you do: you find the emotional center of the poem — the place where the poem announces (directly or indirectly) what’s at stake — and then get there quicker, by cutting words and lines that come before. This helps us get rid of what I call “poetry hairballs” — you know, the throat-clearing we all sometimes do at the beginning of poems. And speaking of which:

pay close attention to title, first line, and last line These three places in the poem have a large impact on its success. They should work for a clear purpose, and get excellent gas mileage. Make sure you understand why and how the title, first line and last line are working (or not working) in your poem. And speaking of endings:

use your ending to usher the poem into its next moment  As a general rule, endings that are tied up tight with a bow are not as effective as endings that remain open, allowing the reader to shove off from the shore of a poem and go for a little row around the lake of his/her life. NB: This advice does not apply to you if you are Lucille Clifton writing this poem.

use details to ground your reader before taking flight  Have you read The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo? It’s a great essay, and it encourages us to give the reader their bearings before we take flight into the amazing heights poetry can inhabit. Here is a link to the essay if you’re interested.

be brave and cut much  These words come to us from my very first teacher of poetry, Tom Ruud. Get out the orphanage for darlings, and then start cutting. Cut anything you can bear to cut: explanation, setting, time, clarification, poetry hairballs, description, etc. Yes, this advice contradicts the triggering town advice above, but remember: revision is an exploration. You can always add things back in in your next revision, but you might learn something important about your poem by performing surgery.

limit punctuation  Too much punctuation in a poem can feel bossy and cluttered. Use line and linebreaks instead to control the pace of your poem, and its movement down the page. Here is a good essay on line by one of my fave poetry foremothers, Denise Levertov, known affectionately on this blog as D-Lev.

record and play back This tip comes to us from Diane Lockward. We’ve all heard the advice to read our drafts out loud, but Diane suggests reading the poem out loud, recording it, then playing it back. I’ve recently begun to do this, and I’m amazed at what I can hear that I couldn’t hear while I was simply reading out loud. I use the free, downloadable Audacity to record and play back.

the buddy system  When you’ve taken a poem as far as you can on your own, have one of your poetry buddies read it and give you their impressions. If you want, you can think of this as workshopping the poem (but that word can have negative connotations for some people, depending on their experience of workshops, so it’s entirely optional to think of it this way). Rules for the buddy system: #1 Don’t apologize for your work. This is harder than it sounds. It’s almost as hard as not apologizing to the babysitter for your messy house. #2 Get to know your reader. This happens over time, and it just means to keep their preferences and, well, pet peeves in mind as you take their feedback. For example, you might have a poetry buddy who abhors alliteration. She will probably tell you to remove the alliteration from your poem. It might be good advice, but it might not be. You make the final decisions. Which reminds me: #3 Don’t take every suggestion the workshop offers up. Ultimately, you are the gal (or guy) who has to figure out what this poem wants to be. It’s very common to get contradictory advice on the same poem from different people. Your job as poet is to understand what the poem wants to be, and help birth it. You don’t want a whole football squad in the delivery room, do you?

And finally,

understand the poem  Whatever choices you make during revisions, make sure you can articulate them for yourself and how they work for a purpose in the poem. This is not something that’s possible during the drafting of a poem; in fact, I think it would ruin the drafting process to bring the intellect to bear upon the process too early. But as the poem is crafted through revisions, you should be able to say why you’re making the choices you’re making.

Reader, we’re almost through our conversation on revision. I hope it’s been helpful for you so far. If you’re the philosophical type as I am, go through the list again and think about how each point can be applied in life (Be brave and cut much? I’m not talking about calories here. Use the buddy-system? Oh yeah). And stay tuned for the next and last installment on revision: the radical.

(**I’m updating this to add the links to other posts in the revision series: here’s part 1 — the philosophical, here’s part 1.5 — a little more philosophy, and here’s part 2 — the usual).

NaPoRevMo and the usual suspects

my list for NaPoRevMo

Reader, remember? We were talking about revision (here and here — scroll down). Rather than write a poem a day for Poetry Month, I’ve decided to work on a revision a day. I’m calling it NaPoRevMo for fun.

Did I say fun? Uh, yeah, not so much. There has been mucho moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth at my desk this week as I pick apart the weak moments of current drafts, as I try to re-see, undo, and do again. And yet, I feel a certain sense of righteousness — kind of the same feeling you have when you eat a lot of spinach or kale.

In our series on revision, it’s time to talk about the usual. This is all the revision advice you’ve heard a thousand times before. I’m covering it because, well, it’s good advice. It’s all stuff we need to think about as we polish our drafts. The key word here is polish. These tips and pointers are less about re-seeing your draft and more about making it the best it can be. It has its place in the revision process — you can implement these tips all along the way, and certainly at the end of your process — but probably none of them is going to transform your draft from one poem into another. I’m just going to hammer these out in list form. Ready? Here we go:

1. The no-brainer: check spelling, punctuation, subject/verb agreement, point of view, etc.

2. Cut any overused or cliched language unless you are using cliches for effect, which should be rare.

3. Punch up the verbs (this is my personal least-favorite revision advice, but still, it’s good advice).

4. Be specific: don’t say “bird,” say “crow.” Be concise: don’t say “cold, hard, icy rain,” say “sleet.” (Speaking of which, check out this lit mag).

5. Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Hint: if you’re using an adjective, perhaps you have the wrong noun (see #4 above). If you’re using an adverb, perhaps you have the wrong verb.

6. Cut unnecessary syllables and words. Hint: fewer syllables are usually better unless you are using a many-syllabled word for effect, e.g., Poe’s “tintinnablulation.”

7. Maximize sounds. Make sure you understand the sounds you’re using, especially vowels, and what their work is in the poem.

8. If there is rhyme, make sure it’s subtle enough not to sound sing-songy and that it works for a purpose in your poem.

9. Use sensory details to bring your reader into the scene. You know: the five senses. Don’t forget smell (it seems we often forget smell in writing, no?).

10. Review linebreaks and beginnings to see what’s emphasized — make sure linebreaks are intentional and work for a purpose in your poem.

11. The title feels right, does its work, and you can say how/why.

12. Exposition is moved up into the title and/or epigraphs as much as possible.

13. The form feels right and you know why you’re choosing it. The white space does its work for the poem and you can say how/why.

14. The voice(s) of the poem is/are consistent, and if it/they change(s) you have a good reason for why.

15. Your ending works for your poem and you can say why/how.

And now, the one you’ve all been waiting for:

16. Read your draft aloud. Listen for places where you stumble, drag, get tongue-tied (O! I cringe here at all the places I’ve stumbled, dragged, been tongue-tied so far this week). These are places you need to look at.

As in revision, so, too, in life. This is all about putting your best foot forward: recycling the clothes that make you feel frumpy, replacing the jacket with frayed sleeves, getting a good haircut.

And now, what am I missing? If you have a few usual revision pointers that I’ve forgotten about here, share them in comments. Next in the series will be the useful — specific revision strategies that have been most useful to me. Until then … .

friday roundup: free poetry, ‘a smell of the sea,’ and to know again

It’s Friday morning, early. All my people are sleeping. I have nothing planned today for the first time all week. I’m at my desk and happy to be at my desk and planning to stay at my desk most of the day – joy! And now, Reader, it’s roundup time.

free poetry  For the last few years, poets and poetry lovers across the blogosphere have participated in the Big Poetry Giveaway during poetry month. Poet-blogger Kelli Agodon Russell is the wizard behind the curtain for this event. I’m mixing up the formula a bit this year to give away one book of poetry and one subscription to a lit mag (rather than two books). Stay tuned for details on how to win free poetry.

a smell of the sea Many poets and lovers of poetry are mourning the loss of Adrienne Rich who died this week. In her life and in her poetry, Rich was a feminist, an advocate for the marginalized, and a person who put her money where her mouth was. I admire her activism, and I’m grateful for her poetry. I can’t imagine my life without these words: “A wild patience has taken me this far.” Rich’s death made me think of a poem by Denise Levertov, “September 1961,” which explores the subject of the world losing important artists, and the feeling of those left behind, “alone on the road”: “we wonder // how it will be without them… .” I love that this poem ends with a smell of the sea — place of endings (the end of the land, the vast somewhere where many have been buried) and a place of beginnings (the source of life on earth, for example). Read “September 1961″ here (you will have to scroll down a bit).

And then click over to Kathleen Kirk’s blog. She wrote a wonderful piece about the experience of being an artist in the world, and reflects on Adrienne Rich’s directive, “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”

to know again Yesterday, I wrote about revision from a philosophical point of view. I want to say just a bit more about that before moving on to more practical notes on revision. If we look at the etymology of the word revision we see that it comes from the PIE weid, “to know, to see.” And from the Latin re-, “back to the original place, again,” also with a sense of “undoing” (source here).

If we approach revision literally, then, we must know (or see) a poem again. We must go back and undo.

I happen to think this is the very hardest thing about revision because it’s easy to become attached to those words we already have on the page. Again, time and the Resting Drawer enter the mix. But I’ve also had good success and lots of fun by revising through re-drafting, by holding on to the idea and the impulse of a poem (and maybe even a few key phrases), but writing it over and over again, differently each time. Once you’ve re-seen to your satisfaction, other revision strategies can enter the mix. The Mail Order Bride’s letter home came out of several rounds of redrafting. Have you tried re-drafting as a revision strategy?

Ok, that’s the roundup. I’ve gone on longer than I intended. Also, none of my people are sleeping anymore. It’s on to the next phase of the day. Happy Friday to you, and thanks for reading.

notes on revision: the philosophical, or, get rid of what ain’t no wolf

public domain from wikimedia commons

So, Reader, I’ve been thinking about revision. April is Poetry Month and many poets are gearing up to write a poem a day for April. I typically join in this drafting festival, but this year my intuition is saying, You’d be better off doing a revision a day than a poem a day. Of course, as much as I’d prefer diving into new work, I know my intuition is right. I do not need 30 more unfinished, mostly mediocre poems. I need to polish what I’ve been working on lately and send it out into the world.

So, over the last few weeks I’ve been gathering up every bit of revision advice I’ve collected over the years, and I want to share it with you. As I looked it over, I realized it fell into four categories: the philosophical, the usual, the useful, and the radical. I’m planning a post on each category. We’ll start today with “the philosophical,” then drill down to the nitty gritty in “the usual” and “the useful.” We’ll end up with “the radical” — which I hope will generate enthusiasm for the revision work that awaits.

And speaking of philosophical, my philosophy is that most advice for revision is also good advice for life, so I’ll be commenting on that from time to time as well.

Let us begin:

Michelangelo, it is said, believed that his role as sculptor was to free the work of art contained within a block of marble. The quote, as I’m finding it online, is:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as thought it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

Elie Weisel has similar thoughts about writing:

“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what youput on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”

To me, both of these philosophies encourage us to understand what a poem is, or wants to be, and to apply our poetic skills to honor that, to bring forth the poem. In this post, I talked about drafting the poem “Letter to Rodin.” I wanted the poem to be about suffering. I fought tooth and nail to make the poem be about suffering! Eventually, I accepted that the poem wanted to be about longing. As soon as I accepted that, and began to work in concert with the poem’s impulse, the draft came together.

I don’t read either of these quotes to mean that we must always cut in revisions. Sometimes, it’s the large silence around a poem that must be cut out — the poem must push its way into that space a bit more to fully unfold.

These quotes do, however, ask us to honor the piece of art for what it truly is and to bring it forth. Sometimes this takes time. Sometimes it takes years, even. If you’re not sure what a poem is trying to be, set it aside for a while. I have a Resting Drawer for just this purpose. Do you have a Resting Drawer? Look through it from time to time. The poem’s impulse may dawn on you one day, and then you can get to work again.

And as in writing, so in life: one of our great tasks as human beings is to cut away at all that is not authentically us; to, instead, be true to the shape of our souls.

My favorite way for remembering this advice in writing and in life comes from the Old Country, also known as The Township, a little spot in northern Michigan that’s home for me. In The Township there’s a man who does snow and ice sculptures. Once, commenting on a sculpture of a wolf he’d carved, he said his process had been to “get rid of what ain’t no wolf” (I am indebted to Gerry for passing along this bit of advice to me. If you want to know about The Township, Gerry’s blog is the place to find out).

Get rid of what ain’t no wolf. That’s a philosophy I can sign up for.

I can see clearly now

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Reader, I am caught up. What this means, exactly, I’m not sure, but my inner caught-up indicator is saying ‘yes.’ The behind-on-everything dashboard light is no longer on. I spent a few days taming the wild to-do list beast, and now I’m deliciously relaxed.

Deliciously relaxed and thinking about how April is Poetry Month. That means Poetry Month starts in exactly six days! There will be the usual poem-a-day pledges, the great big poetry book giveaway, etc., etc. Usually, I’m teaching poetry in my kids’ classrooms in April, but this year I think I’ll sit out, since May is Moving Month (insert deer-in-the-headlights look here).

For much of this school year, I have been a drafting machine — new and unexpected drafts tumbling out one after the other. For the last few weeks, although I’m still writing every morning, there has been a lull — a draft here and a draft there, but less time dedicated specifically to drafting, and less urgency behind the poems finding their way to paper. Although I love the heady, draft-a-minute pace of intensely creative times, I know there is a natural ebb and flow to the creative process. Even as I’ve learned to understand and respect this rhythm, I always feel a little sad at the waning of an intensely creative time. Sigh… .

My intuition says now is the time to turn to revisions (Dear Intuition, I trust you, I really, really trust you!) – and, believe me, I have a stack of ‘em. . As part of my focus on revision, I’m planning a post on the most useful revision advice I’ve found/tried/used, so stay tuned for that.

If you are a writer or an artist (and I use that terms in the broadest sense of the words — perhaps your art is gardening or home design and decor), do you find there’s an ebb and flow to your creative process? How do you navigate the highs and lows? Share in comments if you like.

And have a wonderful last week before Poetry Month!

friday round up: revision, the power of vowels, and going to sleep with ‘Fire on Her Tongue’

Happy Friday, all. I am up in the pre-dawn silence of the house doing a bit of reading and writing before the kiddos wake and the onslaught begins. Here are some cool things I stumbled upon this week:

Revision. Donald Hall’s words echo continually in my ears: “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp collecting or real estate.” For years, I’ve been reading (and trying to put into practice) everything I can about revision. And yet, there seems to be a dearth of specific, actionable advice besides “punch up the verbs,” “cut out any unnecessary words,” and “read it out loud.” This week, Diane Lockward has remedied that in her post about what is the right time to send out a poem. Her checklist for revision, and her practice of recording herself reading the poem and listening to the recording are specific and actionable. I never thought of recording and playing back — what a great idea! I also loved Traci Brimhall’s suggestion at Her Circle on revising “toward the strange” and her reference to Yeats’ approach of revising toward “a more passionate syntax.” Again, actionable — and somewhat contrary to the oft-used paradigm of drafting as the time to go wild, and revision as the time to tame the monster. Thank you Sandy Longhorn for the link to this article.

By the way, I found both of these posts through Internet rabbit holes. Just sayin’.

The Power of Vowels. Did you know that vowels control your brain? Go read this fascinating article that summarizes the research of linguists who have found that “humans instinctively associate pitch with size,” and that different vowel sounds “pull our brains” to different things (they give great examples in the article). I don’t know about you, but I plan to use this info not just in my poetry, but as a parenting strategy! (Ha! I’ll let you know how that goes).

Going to sleep with Fire on Her Tongue. I recently purchased my first eBook of poetry, Fire On Her Tongue by Two Sylvias Press. I’ve been reading through it each night before I go to sleep (well… and at other times, too). My understanding is that the editors, Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, put together this anthology of living women writers completely paperlessly (say that 10 times fast) so that the volume is not only chock-full of great poetry, but its production had minimal environmental impacts. Pretty cool. Last night in the cold, dark waiting room of the ballet studio, I read amazing poetry by the light of my iPad. From a wild ride through the gravy of the universe by Martha Silano, to a quiet, open-ended, and amazing meditation on “Anhinga Drying Her Wings” by Peggy Shumaker – and everything in between–, I’m enjoying the portability and variety of this anthology and the excitement of finding so many new poets to read and learn from. Let’s hear it for the girls!

That’s it for today’s round up. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!