HOW TO EDIT A POEM
Today’s entry feels worryingly a bit like Chinese Whispers and we all know how that turns out. It is taken from a Facebook post shared by Sally Evans the poet and publisher. She was sharing a blog entry by Kirsten Luckins. She was sharing advice she’d received at a Writers’ Retreat. Some of the advice sounds extremely useful which is why I pass it on. All of it sounds interesting. Some of it would suit one poet but not another. Some of it would suit one poem but not another. And I give my own personal reactions afterwards. But it all keeps the writerly mind ticking on.
This is what Kirsten Luckins wrote on her blog: ‘None of the advice below is written by me. It was given to me a last week’s Wolf At The Door retreat by one of the retreat leaders. I have no idea if Vishvantara wrote these points herself but if she did she’s a genius.’
‘15 Ways of Working on a Poem
POINT ONE = Removing half the lines in a poem is a useful exercise. Feel free at the end of it to put them back in I would say. But economy is telling in a poem. And it is a difficult skill for teachers in particular to learn. (And I speak for myself here.) They are so used to repeating things in different ways to a class in the hope of catching everybody that it can be difficult to just switch that off. But in writing you really only need to say something once. And a poem should be a piece of writing in which the reader feels he is participating. He should feel clever at working something out. He won’t like feeling he’s being treated as someone dim.
POINT TWO – Expanding the poem by doubling it could be a useful exercise if you find you are exploring parts of your theme better or suddenly finding a different angle to look at something from. Don’t be afraid to go back to the original though I suspect you will find you have also discarded some of that if you do decide to explore something else. What Spanish has to do with it I don’t know. Urdu or Gaelic or Swahili would be just as useful in this context for me. I don’t know any of them either.
POINT THREE – Looking for the energetic points and beginning and ending with them could work. I remember the poet Margaret Gillies Brown saying in a workshop that you should begin your poems with a particularly strong line and end it with an extremely good one too. She said that those are the first lines a poetry editor will look at in work submitted to them and, if they don’t like those, they probably won’t read the rest.
POINT FOUR – Looking at what is ‘heart’ and what ‘head’ in a poem sounds useful. A poem should SHOW not STATE. You do this by careful use of image and you should allow the image to do the telling BY showing. Don’t attempt to speak FOR your image.
WHAT I WOULD SAY ABOUT THE REST is that you should do what seems useful to you and the poem you are working on. The first rule in writing is that there are no rules. This is not a definitive list of things you HAVE to do when editing a poem. The only suggestion that doesn’t sound useful at all is attempting to explain your poem to a philosopher. This would involve STATING and the use of abstract language I assume. The language you use in a poem should be concrete language, the language of the senses.
The advice about putting your poem in a drawer for three months and then coming back to it is good. Just coming back to your poem the next morning can be a salutary experience. While you are sleeping, or walking, or making your meal, your mind is unconsciously going over your poem again. When you come back to it, you really are looking at it in a fresh way and can see more clearly how to improve it by discarding this line, adding another, and that phrase you were having difficulty with? It suddenly clarifies itself.
What this list doesn’t say – and it should- is that in the process of revising your poem you should read it aloud. That is how you become more aware of the rhythm of it. And the rhythm matters. It is also how your remind yourself of the fun you had in writing that first draft! And you may even decide your poem really is more fun now after all that work!
Today’s entry feels worryingly a bit like Chinese Whispers and we all know how that turns out. It is taken from a Facebook post shared by Sally Evans the poet and publisher. She was sharing a blog entry by Kirsten Luckins. She was sharing advice she’d received at a Writers’ Retreat. Some of the advice sounds extremely useful which is why I pass it on. All of it sounds interesting. Some of it would suit one poet but not another. Some of it would suit one poem but not another. And I give my own personal reactions afterwards. But it all keeps the writerly mind ticking on.
This is what Kirsten Luckins wrote on her blog: ‘None of the advice below is written by me. It was given to me a last week’s Wolf At The Door retreat by one of the retreat leaders. I have no idea if Vishvantara wrote these points herself but if she did she’s a genius.’
‘15 Ways of Working on a Poem
- Take an unfinished poem of twenty-five to forty lines or more.Remove half of the lines (whichever hand-picked lines you choose).Now cut it in half again. Scream as loudly as you like.
- Take a poem of ten or twenty lines and make it forty or fifty.Stretch it, milk it, pad it, free-associate, spider-diagram it and repeat things in Spanish if you have to.
- Find the energetic points.Where are the ‘hot’ areas?Put one as your first line.Put another as your last line.Put another as your last line.Rearrange the other lines or verses in between.
- Divide your imagery into ‘heart’ and ‘head’ and cut out everything not heart-felt.Where there used to be ‘head’ imagery, try using simple language that doesn’t compare anything to anything else.
- Make sure you consider cutting your last line and the few above it as well. Where does the poem itself want to end?(Beware of the‘it’snot over till the fat lady sings’ feeling.The end must come as a surprise to you as you write, not be the one you started off thinking you must have.Have you strained the poem into finishing where you want it to go?Poems often delight in stopping midstream taking off drizzling away or turning around and biting us playfully.Only rarely do they delight by ‘the moral of the story is’ or ‘so this is how it all ended up’.
- Find a phrase or a line or two that you are a bit complacent about, a bit of writing you think is quite good, and rephrase it noticing how attached you are to the previous version.Ask a friend which is the better option.
- If you are writing from or about a memory, insert a detail from your present experience.If writing from or about the present, include a memory.
- Imagine that at a certain point you rose a hundred feet into the air and looked down at the tableau vivant of the poem.What is its gesture?Can you somehow include this in the poem?
- Imagine that at a certain point in the poem you became very tiny and sat within a phrase that you had just written.Write what you see around you.
- If you have too many little prosy words, articles, or linking words, try re-writing those phrases with fewer small words.
- The word ‘of’ is a poetic cliché, so delete the ‘of the’s eg ‘the gate of the mind’.It should be ‘the mind’s gate’.Also beware of any words you wouldn’t use in conversation eg ‘aplenty’.
- Try translating your poem for the benefit of someone with limited knowledge of your language.
- Try explaining your poem to a philosopher.Add some of this explanation to your poem.
- Always keep your original draft.That’s very important.
- Put your poem in a drawer for three months and start something else.’
POINT ONE = Removing half the lines in a poem is a useful exercise. Feel free at the end of it to put them back in I would say. But economy is telling in a poem. And it is a difficult skill for teachers in particular to learn. (And I speak for myself here.) They are so used to repeating things in different ways to a class in the hope of catching everybody that it can be difficult to just switch that off. But in writing you really only need to say something once. And a poem should be a piece of writing in which the reader feels he is participating. He should feel clever at working something out. He won’t like feeling he’s being treated as someone dim.
POINT TWO – Expanding the poem by doubling it could be a useful exercise if you find you are exploring parts of your theme better or suddenly finding a different angle to look at something from. Don’t be afraid to go back to the original though I suspect you will find you have also discarded some of that if you do decide to explore something else. What Spanish has to do with it I don’t know. Urdu or Gaelic or Swahili would be just as useful in this context for me. I don’t know any of them either.
POINT THREE – Looking for the energetic points and beginning and ending with them could work. I remember the poet Margaret Gillies Brown saying in a workshop that you should begin your poems with a particularly strong line and end it with an extremely good one too. She said that those are the first lines a poetry editor will look at in work submitted to them and, if they don’t like those, they probably won’t read the rest.
POINT FOUR – Looking at what is ‘heart’ and what ‘head’ in a poem sounds useful. A poem should SHOW not STATE. You do this by careful use of image and you should allow the image to do the telling BY showing. Don’t attempt to speak FOR your image.
WHAT I WOULD SAY ABOUT THE REST is that you should do what seems useful to you and the poem you are working on. The first rule in writing is that there are no rules. This is not a definitive list of things you HAVE to do when editing a poem. The only suggestion that doesn’t sound useful at all is attempting to explain your poem to a philosopher. This would involve STATING and the use of abstract language I assume. The language you use in a poem should be concrete language, the language of the senses.
The advice about putting your poem in a drawer for three months and then coming back to it is good. Just coming back to your poem the next morning can be a salutary experience. While you are sleeping, or walking, or making your meal, your mind is unconsciously going over your poem again. When you come back to it, you really are looking at it in a fresh way and can see more clearly how to improve it by discarding this line, adding another, and that phrase you were having difficulty with? It suddenly clarifies itself.
What this list doesn’t say – and it should- is that in the process of revising your poem you should read it aloud. That is how you become more aware of the rhythm of it. And the rhythm matters. It is also how your remind yourself of the fun you had in writing that first draft! And you may even decide your poem really is more fun now after all that work!