Is it okay to re-edit a poem just to do it? Or should we leave a poem alone, let it be whatever it is? That depends on what you plan to do with the poem. Sometimes, you might want to keep tinkering with a poem just to see where the tinkering takes the art of it. Sometimes you want to keep editing just for the practice of editing, or re-imagining the art of it. Sometimes you won't be satisfied until you've chiseled and sanded, buffed and shined until the poem is as good as you can possibly make it.
This morning I reread a poem I wrote several months ago and thought was finished. I should know better. Several months is not a very long time in the life of a poem or even a draft of a poem, but in this case it turned out to be long enough to give me some distance. I could reread with a measure of objectivity that wasn't available when I finished the previous "last draft" of it in June.
What I saw, immediately, was how overwritten the poem is. I had written it as part of a "word prompt" project in our Wednesdays@One salon. The words meant to prompt me were clouds, bravery, patience, and boulder. Here is the poem composed to that prompt and shared with the group:
anyhow make you understand
night is not now upon us,
not darkening the bloom
of the newly leafed-out trees
that sway outside your window,
and not penetrating to here,
where we sit trying to communicate.
whatever that means to you now,
on a day of overcast—thunderclouds
blossoming one from another
and threatening rain—
and not night, though you are right,
probably bravely, to think so:
a boulder, and night,
as you try a third time
to make me understand.
105 words, including the title. As I recall, it got a fairly positive review from the group and generated some good discussion of its merits. Rereading it, though, I see nothing but words, words and more words; more words in fact than the subject and the art warrant. As I say, it's overwritten.
What is the point of the first three lines of the poem? Well, it's to begin. The poem begins by establishing a voice (an "I" speaking to a "you") and setting or scene (a conversation happening in a room with a window). The lines also establish tense (present) and mood (negation--not what is, but what is not), and purpose: what's going on is more than a conversation; it's an explanation and possibly a disagreement. There's some tension, as well, as you can tell by the frustration of the speaker of the poem: "try as I will" and "make you understand."
What else do the first three lines tell you? You're entering a story, or a moment in a story, with characters, dialogue (potentially), and plot or at least a narrative line (first this happens, then that). This story element puts you, the reader, into the role of observer, like a theatergoer.
The remainder of the stanza indicates spring, and an inside and outside view where the initial hint of a disagreement is refined to a simple question: is night falling? A look back up at the title of the poem should clarify that the characters are someplace that has visiting hours, a nursing home maybe, or a hospital, a ward.
So I get the story and the treatment, but it's just too wordy. I see that the poem wants to be accessible. Its grammar is standard and its syntax is pretty straightforward. It doesn't want you to dwell on the language but instead on the story. Or does it? Actually, the poem wants to show off its language. Look at these lines:
The whole sequence emphasizes the word "not" as a way of suggesting not just something negative, but a cancelling: a point of view (the other person's, whose room we are visiting) is methodically dismissed as if we're overhearing a debate. And what about phrases like "now upon us" and "the darkening bloom"? The usual term for such language is purple.
Same goes for much of the rest of the poem. Listen to these purple phrases: "this day of overcast," "blossoming one from another," and to the unnecessarily repeated "and night" of the final stanza, set off by two commas for emphasis.
The story, if I may paraphrase, is about two people having a chat in a room that has suddenly grown dark under an approaching storm. One of them thinks night is coming on and the other, the frustrated speaker, is unable to explain. In the end, though, the speaker realizes that it is he who misunderstands. I still think that's a great premise for a poem. But I wonder if I might get to that story more artfully, with less purple (i.e., emotionally overcharged) language.
So I tried rewriting the poem again this morning. Here's what I did . . .
New leaves shake in it,
you and I sit in it
trying to communicate.
on this overcast day—
thunderclouds blossoming
and threatening rain—
stubborn and not
worth mentioning now.
a boulder, as you try a third time
to make me understand.
From 105 to 55 words. That's a start and I think I've retained the idea. I've converted the content of the first three lines of the version earlier to the three words of the first line, adding a question mark. The speaker, now not so (or at least not yet) sure of himself, merely reacts to some observation. I abandon the negations for something more positive: two men sitting and talking but possibly not communicating much. And I've kept the idea of spring through the mere suggestion of "new leaves."
In the second stanza, I want to keep the idea that it's not nightfall darkening the room but something else, and I've replaced that lazy verb "is" with one more active, "tick," which should suggest the sameness and boredom of a day in the life of a man who's lost his memory, if not his mind. For I decided that I don't want to be too upfront about the sick man's condition; it's the product of it--a misplaced sense of time--that is the important thing here. More than this, though, 2 p.m. may be a stubborn fact, but in the larger context of a man's failing mind, hardly material; that is, "not worth mentioning."
So in this new version of the poem, we have two men miscommunicating about the time of day and the cause for the room growing darker, both unable to convince the other of the truth of it. All by suggestion through images. This makes the poem a poem, in my mind. It gestures rather than explains. Which makes the closing stanza that much more poignant, I think. And which is why I chose to open it with an assenting word, as if the speaker hasn't merely given up on the facts of the matter, on his argument, but has come round to the sick man's larger meaning: I'm dying. The poem is helped in this respect by the wonderful word, boulder, from our word-prompt project. By the end of the poem, the fact of impending death is as plain as a boulder.
So I think what I've done in re-revising this poem is to see it again or anew, which is what revision means, and to make better art of it. Have I cut too much? I was happy, imperfectly maybe, but still pleased with the earlier version. That one itself was the result of several drafts of cutting and eliminating. But what I like about this new version is its suggestiveness.
Sometimes it feels like drudgery having another look and another at a poem that has already been looked at, looked over, looked upon numerous times. It feels like maybe you're about to cut into bone. But if you get to a better outcome, as I think I have with this version, that drudge is worth doing.
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