Chapter Eight: Revision

Beginning writers tend to write first drafts and call them final drafts, but as we know by now, writing a poem—or writing anything, for that matter—is a process that takes time. On rare occasions a poem will pour forth finished in its initial draft, but the large majority of the time, each poem will need to be revised. Whether you change four words, four stanzas, or one period, we can understand it all as being part of the process of revision.

The origin of the word “revision” is the Latin revisonem meaning “a seeing again.” When we revise, we see our poem again, which is to imply that we see it differently. The more time that lapses between our writing of the poem and when we look at it again, the more objectively we will see the poem. Imagine writing a poem and not looking at it for ten years. Ten years is time enough to truly see the poem differently because you are literally a different person looking at that poem. You’ve had new experiences that have influenced your person and your understanding of poetry. What you wrote ten years ago is different than what you would write now. Write long enough and you will have the experience of returning to a poem and not even remembering writing it, asking, “Is this mine?”

When we write and revise poems, sometimes we grapple with the emotional tendency to protect or defend our work, which can hamper changes that could improve our poems. With distance, we see a poem objectively; we are therefore able to make changes that improve the poem because we’ve forgotten how much work went into the poem in the first place. Our memories and feelings that the poem may touch on have also changed, and so we may no longer consider certain parts crucial to the poem.

Waiting ten years to revise a poem you wrote yesterday may be the easiest way to bring a new eye to the poem, but it’s not very practical. As writers we need to also be our best readers, capable of seeing weakness and capable of the bravery it takes to make the big changes to our poems when necessary—even when that means cutting our favorite lines, even when it means slashing the stanza we labored over for a month. This chapter will address ways to improve your ability to see a poem anew and will provide you with methods and tools to make the most of revision.

Three Goals, Four Elements

In her book The Practice of Creative Writing, Heather Sellers identifies energy, tension, and insight as being essential goals for any good piece of writing. These three characteristics make writing entertaining to our wit, rewarding to our spirit, and pleasurable to our senses. When writing lacks these things, the language goes slack, the purpose becomes hazy, and the reader disengages from the text. All three characteristics are necessary in engaging the reader and holding the reader’s attention. We don’t ever want our reader to be bored or confused.

By identifying these three important characteristics, Sellers also illuminates the main goals writers have when revising. We ask questions and revise our poems in order to increase the energy, the tension, and the insight. And we do so by tending to four main elements: clarity, language, structure, and speaker.

To achieve energy, tension, and insight, the following questions may be asked in regard to each element:

1. Clarity

• Is it clear to the reader what this poem is about?
• Is it clear to the reader who the speaker is and to whom the poem is being addressed?
• Is it clear to the reader where the poem is taking place / what its setting (location, time) is?
• Can diction be more precise?
• Are images clearly seen?
• Does the procession of images / the order in which they occur make sense logically?
• Are there places where expansion is needed?

2. Language

• Does the poem contain any clichés?
• Is the language fresh and surprising?
• Are there any places where the energy of the language goes slack?
• Are there any Latinate, multi-syllabic words that can be replaced with more Germanic, sense-inducing words?
• Is the language musical and entrancing?
• Are there places where assonance and alliteration can be increased?
• Are there any places where assonance, alliteration, or rhyme make the poem sound too sing-songy?
• Am I using too many articles and prepositions, which sap energy?
• Is any repetition of words ineffective?
• If using end-rhyme, are there places where the rhyme feels forced instead of natural and organic to the poem?
• Are there occasions where the syntax is so artificial that it could be classified what we might call “Stereotypical Indian speak”? (E.g.: You write poem good.) How about “Yoda speak”? (E.g.: Writing a poem are you?)
• Are there any uses of archaic language?
• Have I examined each word and verified that it is needed?
• Are there any nouns that would better as verbs?

3. Structure

• Do the lines create a pace appropriate to the poem’s subject?
• Do line breaks make the most out of image and emphasis?
• Do the lines maintain energy or cause it to slack?
• Does each character in the poem belong?
• Is the opening of the poem surprising, alluring, and energetic? Does it make the reader want to keep reading?
• Does the ending of the poem “click shut” like a box?
• Is there any content that can be removed?

4. Speaker

• What is the emotional center of the poem? Is it complex enough to create tension?
• Is the speaker’s voice genuine in tone, or do some lines sound artificial?
• Are line lengths appropriate to the speaker’s personality and voice?
• Is it clear what’s at stake / what the risk is for the speaker of this poem?
• Is the tense (past, present, etc.) the most effective for the poem to produce energy?
• Are there places where the persona of the poem is explaining context instead of living in it?

A Revision Example

Sometimes where a poem ends up is not where you thought it would. As Naomi Shihab Nye has said, sometimes you start to write about church and end up at the dog races. You just never know—and that’s the fun of it.

The following is an example of my own poem “19-19” and its stages of revision.

When I lived in Washington State, I often traveled to neighboring states. One weekend I was in Sandpoint, Idaho, eating lunch at a downtown pub, when I was caught by a black-and-white photograph of a girl’s basketball team. The girls, maybe eight of them, wore long skirts, bobby socks, and saddle shoes. Half of them lay on their stomachs in the front row with their ankles crossed behind them. The caption beneath the photograph, which appeared in a local newspaper in 1914, summarized the day. The girls had played a game that went into overtime, but the officials ended the game at a tie because there was a dance that night. This photograph became the trigger for my poem. Here is its first draft:

It would take another period
Before a draw was declared
And the girls would get to go
To the dance. Fathers in bleachers
Cheering them on, perhaps, whishing
For sons. But the boys team lost
That night. The caption told me so.
Those words rolling along
The enlarged page on the wall
In the bar in that black and white
From 1914. This was before the war.
Five girls lying
On their bellies,
Feet crossed at their ankles, white
Bobble socks. All five hold basketballs
Under their chins.
Referees declared it
A tie. 17-17. Didn’t want the girls
To strain themselves the caption
Says. Go to the dance
Chaperoned instead. How fun
It must’ve been to be a girl
That night. Dancing in the arms
of number 24 on the boys team,
challenging him
to a game of ball
on the pavement the next
afternoon. How fun to be the girl
who asked the night before the bomb
dropped.

When I look back on this poem, I can see the mental and artistic moves I was making in an effort to discover the bigger something to write about. I was clearly loosened up, non-judgmental. There is word play—“whishing”—as well as a feminist tone of sorts that begins with the thought that maybe the fathers of these girls wished (whished!) they were sons, which grows into: “Didn’t want the girls / To strain themselves the caption / Says.” I was very interested in what the climate would have been in regard to gender stereotypes. The poem reports on the actual photograph and my encounter with it, describing the girls in the photograph. Then there is an imaginative leap into what it might have felt like being one of these girls, and then the realization (as the writer) that 1914 would have been before the first World War. The poem is laced with sexuality and reproduction—the break on “period,” the focus on couples at the dance. It also contains references to history, war, and gender issues. In addition, it is also has a setting and time.

After writing this poem I remember taking a break, and when I returned to the computer I read the poem, printed it out, read it again, and started to crumple it up (I don’t know why—I never do this). The poem seemed flat and cliché, forced, but as I crumpled it up I thought about the line “This was before the war,” and I smoothed out the paper. That line—“This was before the war”—was musical. And I liked how the last two lines surprised with their hard enjambment: “the night before the bomb / dropped.” I thought of the newspaper and the way we not only report information, but how we tell stories that begin to create history and identity. I thought about gossip and the way we spread those stories. And I thought of the way we imagine grandparents, grandchildren on their laps, telling family stories. I turned back to the computer and started to rewrite the poem from scratch. The following is the revision, with notes elucidating some of my thinking behind the decisions I made:

As you see, much of the redrafting of this poem happened by listening to the language and making leaps while maintaining connections as I wrote. In the actual writing process, it is usually sound that drives my poems. Here, I needed to work slower and to pay attention to the logistics of the narrative as I invented family members through time and space. This attention to explaining resulted in using a lot of Latinate words whose main intent is to relay meaning.

This second draft lay out the narrative. After reading this draft out loud, I immediately moved to a third draft to smooth out the sections where the language became clunky or Latinate. The poem went through one more revision, and then a workshop after it was basically finished. I remember several comments made in that workshop, but the suggestion that I took was to add a section in which we find out what happened to the missing mom. My professor had an issue with the metaphor of the body as a caterpillar scoring a basket, but I kept it as was because it made sense to me. The final version below was published in the literary journal Crazyhorse.

Creating Your Own Aesthetic

The revision process of “19-19” reflects my own poetics at the time that I composed and revised it. If the first draft was given to any other poet, the revision would be completely different. As you begin to revise your poems, the most useful approach you can take is to be aware of the decisions you are making and understand why you are making them. I hope you will see the above examples as one of many ways one may approach a poem.