At the start of the year, I blogged about the habits of
writing poetry, and began with the habit of practical observation. I hope
everyone continues practicing that important activity - even if or especially
if (?) it means just sitting around, paying attention to something.
Another habit for writers of poetry to cultivate regularly is revising, which
we'll talk about next Wednesday.
Revision means what it says: seeing again.
In poetic practice, revision means these two things
separately and together: seeing and return.
Seeing the poem you have written can be literal as well as
figurative, of course. Seeing your poem means "stepping away from
it" for perspective, which in turn means seeing the work you have made in
total and in the larger context of its existence.
In the literal sense, you see your poem on the page, its
shape, its width, its length . . . its typographical footprint. I think
we all do this as a way of assessing, initially at least, whether what we've
written looks like a poem. Beyond this initial look, we often make
changes to lines, stanzas, paragraphs, and margins based solely on how the
typography hits the eye.
We also "see" in a more figurative sense--seeing,
as it were, how a poem sounds or behaves sonically, rhythmically and so
on. How often do you say lines or phrases of your poem-in-process over
and over to yourself, even if only silently, attempting to get the cadence or
the stresses right? This, too, is revision.
After you've worked on a new poem for a time, you may step
back and try to see it in its totality, as a verbal artifact with a beginning,
middle and end, or with a completeness of thought and expression that you know
to be complete because it satisfies your sense of proportion and
appropriateness. Does it hang together? Does it contain extraneous,
unnecessary language or imagery or sound? Do the lines flow from one to
the next or, conversely, do the lines comment on one another (whatever effect
you want the poem to have as the reader proceeds line by line)?
Yet another kind of seeing involves context. You hold
your new work up to the light of poems that you have made before; poems that
others have made, say, among your personal coterie of writers, such as at W@1,
or among your personal library of models and poetic heroes. How does the
new work appear in comparison to poems of a similar type from the canon (e.g.,
sonnets, dirges, nature poems, imagist poems, etc.)? So much of our
writing--I should say, all of it--is done in relation to other writing by ourselves,
by others dead and alive, that any act of revision must involve this stepping
away from and seeing. This kind of seeing complicates your role as
writer: you become a critical reader.
Then there is the re- part of revision. This
"again-ness" is where writing turns into burden for all writers of
poems. I don't believe there's a writer among us, or whoever lived for
that matter, who doesn't rejoice at a poem that comes out whole and finished
and unassailable direct from the brain! This is the inspired poem.
But such a writing experience is as rare as it is exhilarating. For most
of our writing, the process feels stop-and-go, slightly constipated, even, and
the very opposite of facile. It is a process of uncertainty, which is to
say, of discovery.
We often feel that writing a poem means covering the same
ground over and over, starting over, looking again, reconsidering. It is
painstaking. It is deliberate. It is self-correcting. It is
fraught with decision and will. The re- part of revision requires
patience, understanding, courage, perseverance, and belief. And
commitment.
I have heard writers of poems say they never revise and
indeed some are famous for having said so about their work. Charles
Bukowski famously claimed he never revised, that his poems sprang from his
being (or his beer) whole cloth. Frank O'Hara also made a
"style" out of so-called "automatic writing," which for him
was a close relative of action painting. Many of John Ashbery's poems read
as though they are riffed from a single sitting, and in fact, he claimed to
write this way. Coleridge told friends that his poem, "Kubla
Khan," was "taken down" verbatim from an opium dream.
There are times, precious times, when a poem springs forth
for me, too, even one whose quality I can't find much fault with. These
are poems that seem to come "from somewhere," are
"inspired" and feel like they have a genesis all their own. I
merely take dictation.
But of course this isn't really true. For the truth is
that I am constantly writing poems--or lines, phrases, rhythms, tones, images,
figures--in my head, which is to say, not always at a keyboard or in my
journal. And as I write them, I revise them in part or in whole.
Many float away with sleep or some distraction. Some stick, become
repetitive, until I actually do sit down at my keyboard or my notebook and
begin to record them. Once this activity begins, I start to examine in
detail the rhythms, syntax, pitch, and tempo of the words. I begin to
see, literally, how certain words appear in succession and, now that they are
frozen on a page or screen, how or whether they "play well together"
or need more encouragement. Eventually, I start asking myself, Why have I
written this poem? What am I trying to say with it? This is when I
get into the "about-ness" of the poem.
Often enough, the process I've just described works in
reverse, or gets jumbled up. In fact, my revision process is recursive
and piecemeal: two steps forward, one step back. I often work a poem like
a jigsaw puzzle, fitting a corner together here, an edge there, a bright spot
somewhere else. It requires patience and perspective. And
honesty. I have to assess what I have done as honestly as my eyes and
ears, my experience, my training and my education permit me to do. And
then I have to decide whether to continue writing the poem I'm working on or
abandon it.
I find that laying a poem--a proto-poem--aside for a time provides the perspective
I need to return to it with fresh eyes and understanding, to see its
possibilities. So abandoning a poem in process is always a conditional
affair: I never know when or if I'll get back to it. If the work leaves
enough of an impression on my mind and imagination, then it will tug at me, it
will "percolate" until I come back to it in earnest. This, too,
is part of the revision process.
Well, that's how I do it. How about you? How do you revise?
Do you employ a technique, a process, a routine? How honest are you about
your own writing? Have you ever held onto a line, an image, a phrase, a
figure, a form, even a theme or subject in a poem beyond all reason or
propriety, like a dog with a bone? Revision is commitment. Have you
ever refused to commit the sometimes radical changes needed to make a poem of
your words? I have! Have you ever said to yourself, But I don't
want the poem to mean this or behave this way or look like this on the page,
when "this way" may be exactly what the poem is telling you it must
be? Revision is submission.
For next week, then, select a poem that you believe needs revision, one that's
not yet finished or that hasn't assumed the form or voice or diction or flow or
depth that you suspect it has to achieve in order to be a true poem.
Spend more time with it. Ask yourself what and where the problems lie
that you need to solve. I am not talking about taking up a couple of
lines or an image that you jotted down months or years ago and making a poem
out of them! I AM talking about taking a draft of a poem that you worked
on at some point an then set aside, or perhaps one you've noodled over for some
time now, or perhaps even one that you thought was finished but maybe isn't, if
you're really being honest with your work.
Bring the original or draft version with you to Wednesdays@One, along with a
revised version. Be prepared to tell everyone what you focused on in the
revision, why you selected that aspect, and how you went about making
changes. Perhaps most important, be prepared to talk about your revising habits--any you'd like to do away with, any you'd like to cultivate. You don't have to produce a finished version--this session isn't
about completion--but you do have to spend enough time with a draft to produce
some meaningful change that can be explained.
