Craft Notes: Poetry
by Adelina Sarkisyan
INTERVIEWER: How do you know when you’ve finished [a poem]?
Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91, The Paris Review
GILBERT: If I’m writing well it comes to an end with an almost-audible click. When I started out I wouldn’t write a poem until I knew the first line and the last line and what it was about and what would make it a success. I was a tyrant and I was good at it. But the most important day in my career as a writer was when Linda said, Did you ever think of listening to your poems? And my poetry changed. I didn’t give up making precreated poetry, but you have to write a poem the way you ride a horse—you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day—you’ll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
Process
Think back on any author interview you’ve read (or heard). Chances are, you’ll find at least one question on their writing process. What is their routine? Early bird or night owl? “I need coffee to write” or “tea please?” “I-write-every-day” or “I-write-in-bursts?” Write from bed or write at a desk? Edit as you go or edit upon completion?
I admit, I used to live for these types of questions. I collected writer’s routines like lovers, hoping that one day, I would find one that would fit me just right. But writing, like all art, is fluid and subjective. There’s nothing prescriptive about the craft. When you wade through the details, how you write and revise is a purely personal process. And more so, one can argue, with poetry. I’m not here to tell you how to revise or to outline a ten-step process on poetry revision. I will, however, try to seed a few methods of revision that are embedded in instinct, self, and sense.
On revision: Let’s take a look at Oscar Wilde. Robert H. Sherard writes, “One of [Oscar Wilde’s] stories was that his hostess in a country house having asked him at dinner how he had spent the day he had answered: ‘I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence.’ ‘And in the afternoon?’ ‘In the afternoon, I put it back again.’”
How much of revising feels like running in a hamster wheel? I know I’ve spent hours revising a poem, only to click “undo” a few hundred times and end up right where I started. Thinking back on the process, revision isn’t linear, it is wholly labyrinthian. And unlike prose, the poetic form isn’t generally linear either (unless you’re talking prose poetry). If you spent an afternoon moving a few sentences around the page (or just staring at the page), don’t bang your head against a wall just yet. Trust the process.
So much of the resistance we have to revision is because of our belief that it must be results oriented. Of course, you want to be moving toward completing the poem but sitting with the material is also movement. To an outsider, it might appear to be wasted time. Perhaps your own inner critic whispers this to you as you try to sleep. But revision is just as much about being comfortable in the labyrinth as it is trying to bulldoze through the walls.
On time: In his Paris Review interview, Jack Gilbert says, “I once worked on a poem for twelve years before I found it.”
Some poems arrive in seconds, full formed. Others take weeks, months, years to emerge. We can move things around, delete, add, re-write, cry ourselves to sleep; but knowing how to sit with the poem is just as important as knowing how to work with it. Some things to ask yourself when revising becomes unbearable: Is the poem ready to emerge now? Am I too close to the subject? Am I in ‘analysis paralysis’ territory? Do I need to take a walk? Can I revisit this in a week?
On ‘killing darlings’: The late poet Mary Oliver said, “Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now, they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn’t necessary should not be in the poem.”
Kill your darlings. You’ve heard this phrase a million times, I’m sure. ‘Darlings’ are words, lines, images, etc. that we are often most proud of. We love them selfishly and may not care if their meaning is clear to the reader or not. But I don’t know if I personally agree with this sentiment when it comes to poetry. This is, of course, different than revising to create a stronger voice; tightening up what is holding back rhythm; and creating clarity overall. Like a sculptor with a slab of clay, the work of revising is cutting away the extra bits that are sabotaging the message, voice, flow (what is not the poem) to reveal what is the truth of the poem. For me, revising poetry is feeding the darlings and killing the saboteurs. Find and feed what is your darling — your personal style & voice — and kill what is frivolously shadowing it. The hard work is in knowing the difference.
Rhythm
A few questions: Do you read your poems aloud? What would the soundtrack to this poem sound like? When you read the poem, are you reading languidly or urgently, and does that parallel the message of the poem? Where does your voice stick? Where do you pause? Where do you sing? Where is silence important?
On musicality: Writer Gary Provost explains musicality in writing brilliantly: “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
Exploring the rhythm and musicality of a poem is one of the most important functions in revision. When revising my own poems, this is where I begin. While I’ve never read my poems in front of an audience, I always read them out loud when I am revising. There is something about speaking a poem into existence that reveals its beauty and its flaws. As writers, we must listen to what the poem wants to say, and how. Some poems are urgent and bewildered; they don’t want punctuation or line breaks, they want repetition and run on sentences. Other poems are slow; they meander and prefer traditional structures and line breaks, free verse.
Bailey Cohen’s “Self-Portrait as Yurico Eating a Strawberry” utilizes repetition and very specific line breaks to create a rhythm and pacing that emphasizes the word “red.” The poem isn’t slow moving, it is in your face, passionate, enraged. With every new line, every new stanza, we are struck once again by this overwhelming “redness.” In any other form, the emphasis on this urgency would have been lost. Aria Aber, in “Ideology,” uses short, staccato line breaks to create a feeling of both urgency and neverending-ness. The poem explores shame, girlhood, and culture. It is clear that the first half of the poem is rhythmically different than the second half: the first half is a voice telling us a painful reality and the second half is a voice singing us hope. “we are singing/it’s spring and God/to my song/ is unlistening, unlistening/o Maryam o Miriam/o Mary we are undying.” While the structure stays the same, the specific line breaks, word choice, and use of repetition create two poetic experiences for the reader.
On puzzle pieces: Margaret Atwood, when asked if she writes from page one through to the end, replied, “No. Scenes present themselves. Sometimes it proceeds in a linear fashion, but sometimes it’s all over the place. I wrote two parts of Surfacing five years before I wrote the rest of the novel.”
Don’t be afraid to move, experiment, and reorder your poems. Not always are poems written exactly as they are meant to be in their final forms. Sometimes, bits of a poem are found in another poem, or in a note we made in our phones, or an essay we wrote a year ago. Sometimes, the ending is the beginning, or vice versa. Revising is not just pruning; you can move sections and lines around. Think: would this poem work better in a different order? How can I move this puzzle around to fit into its true shape? Can a section be removed and used to create a new poem? Where can I play?
Structure/Form
Think of the structure and shape of a poem as the house the poem lives in. The poem has a key to one house; no other house will do. The shape of a poem builds on the rhythm and voice. During the revision process, I always play around with form because in the right form, a poem will shine through. Many times, the form evolves to something totally different than what you started with. This piece on poetic lines by the Poetry Foundation might be helpful.
To experiment during revision, structure your poem in a few different ways and see which works better. Ask a thesaurus for new words. Use indentations, enjambments. blank spaces, ellipses, block text, columns. Revision can be play if you think of the poem as something to have a conversation with, not something to domineer. The poem will always tell you what it wants to feel, sound and look like; it’s up to you to be curious enough to explore.
On shape: Mary Oliver says, “prose is printed (or written) within the confines of margins, while poetry is written in lines that do not necessarily pay any attention to the margins, especially the right margin.”
I explored form with Melissa Bernal Austin on her poem “GirlGod.” “GirlGod” was originally submitted to us in a four-stanza format with longer lines that ended in their natural shape. In our revision process, I strongly felt that the narrator’s voice, which was strong and steadfast, needed to be presented in a form that was more structured and pristine. Although the poem reads like prose poetry, the voice doesn’t meander; it tells its story steadily and with clarity. Akin to ‘concrete poetry,’ “GirlGod” is a poem that we revised to look a certain way on the page, a block, because the shape contained and thus, enhanced the story. “I’ll Love You Until the End of the World” by Jill Mceldowny, on the other hand, is not structured like “GirlGod.” It finds its voice in the floating-ness of the lines, each line and line break sonically moving us up and down through the experience of the narrator. The voice is exploratory — it starts, stops, turns, digs, falls, floats. Jill’s choice to structure the poem as she did only enhanced what was already present in the voice. In “Remix with a Few Lines from Keats,” Danielle Cadena Deulen uses closed, empty brackets to indicate the specific spaces in the poem that “thought that can’t be articulated.” The speaker “leaps between hope, anxiety, and the desire to numb” and the presence and absence of words are equally powerful in conveying meaning.
Trust
Jenn Fagan, in this article for Literary Hub, writes, “I see poetry everywhere. In people. Places. Landscapes. Situations no matter how harsh or beautiful. I am exceptionally grateful that it has settled in me so long. I will never turn it from the door. If a poem wants written at 3 am I get up. If it turns up every morning then I delay breakfast. When I travel I am always ready, scanning the world for the next moment that will have me reaching for my pen. I have a deep respect for the process and I won’t shine too bright a light on it.”
Revision can be a very technical, mind-numbing process. (Almost) never is our first draft what we are left with in the end. We prod and poke and try to exalt a first draft into its polished, final form. And some poems are like bulls at a rodeo: we must reel them in lest they destroy us. Apologies for the over dramatization but when you’re up at 3am fiddling with one word that just won’t fit, call me.
Over the years I have learned to trust the revision process more. I only just finished revising a poem I had been working on for over a year. The more we mold the clay, the more we understand just what it takes to take shape. Jack Gilbert, when asked if his writing habits are same today as they were when he was young, replied, “I trust the poems more.” How would your approach to revision change if you did the same?
Recommended Readings
poetry: https://longleafreview.com/b-cohen/
poetry: https://poets.org/poem/ideology
poetry: https://longleafreview.com/girlgod-by-melissa-bernal-austin/
poetry: https://longleafreview.com/jill-mceldowney/
poetry: https://poets.org/poem/remix-few-lines-keats
Miscellaneous Resources
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5583/the-art-of-poetry-no-91-jack-gilbert
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70144/learning-the-poetic-line
