“i, too, dislike it”: the art of revision
Published by January June 5th, 2008 in Discussion Thread, January, Writing Craft.
Revision: the bane of my poetic existence. I dislike it so much that I titled this post after the opening line of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”—a poem which started out as 29 lines when it appeared in print in 1921, to a succinct four lines in the 1967 version.*
But the truth is most poets, including yours truly, try a number of times to articulate and refine a poem, even after it appears in print. Rarely is a poem written that doesn’t need a revision. It is part of the writing process, a deeper, indispensable part that requires more of us than the writing impulse. Revision is about finding your true voice.
Second drafts require a certain amount of objectivity, enthusiasm, and open mindedness. I have to leave my ego at the door, so to speak, when I rework a poem. I’m constantly asking, “Where does the poem begin?” “Who is doing what?” “Do I still enjoy the poem when read aloud?” I’ve been known to bury even the most promising drafts that just don’t work.
Ultimately, a poet has to learn to be true to that voice which has served him or her well in the past. How many of us have taught students or been in workshop situations with a participant who absolutely, positively resists fixing any part of their poems. It becomes something of a power struggle: Who decides what is good? How much revision is too much? Do I have permission to disagree? Can I cut it as a writer? Revision can bring out insecurities in the most seasoned of poets.
That being said, I encourage you to listen to your instincts when it comes to taking advice on revision. I’ve been on both ends of the discussion—instructor and student—so I understand the delicate balance between receiving comments and trusting my gut to improve a poem. A well-intentioned reader can impose his or her sensibilities on the poet’s work both positively and negatively. Sometimes the instinct to resist comes from what the poet instinctually recognizes as bad advice.
On those evenings when I find myself revising, I fall back on the following techniques to pull me through. Feel free to try some or all of these methods, but let go of any expectation that they will solve the problem. Think of this list as a skeleton key to unlock your mental block on revision.
• Wait a week to revise a new poem. That’s enough time to gain perspective yet still have an interest in the subject matter.
• Rewrite the poem completely. In his book Triggering Town, Richard Hugo suggests rewriting a poem over again until it works.
• Isolate each line. Take a fresh, line-by-line look at each word, syllable, and punctuation. Is it all working?
• Read your poem aloud.
• Change the point of view. Sometimes changing the perspective leads the poet and the poem down an unexpected path.
• Write the poem out in prose.
• Take scissors to your poem, if all else fails. Cut it up line by line to see if the poem is more than the sum of its parts.
Once I complete a poem, my first reaction is to move onto the next one. But I know that many of you enjoy the revision process. Why? I’m interested to learn your feelings on rewriting your poems. Do you love it or dislike it, too?
~January.
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*Source, Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions by Robert DiYanni.
22 Responses to ““i, too, dislike it”: the art of revision”
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I like revision but that might mean I don’t do it enough. I write everything with pen and paper. My process is to copy it out over and over adding and subtracting, moving things around. I also read it out loud. It’s the only way to hear the clunky parts. I keep doing this until it’s something I would like to read. Then I read it out loud for someone else and they read it. If it’s still something I would like to read I stop. That doesn’t mean it’s “done.” Most writing is never really done is it?
Nathan makes an excellent point, “Most writing is never really done is it?” I am sixty-five, have folders full of poems and stories that have never been read by anyone but me and my family. I continually go back to poetry I wrote forty years in the dark ages and rewrite it. There are times when the meter and the words do not fit the expression. Then there is that moment when one reads a book or hears a commentary and someone uses a phrase or word that is the searched for piece of the poetic jigsaw. I believe the more we listen not only to the inner voice but to the voices of the life in which we immerse ourselves we find the completion context of expression. That being said, the life we lead changes where we lose, gain or change our perspective. That perspective will dramatically influence the psyche of ones poetry. Rewrite is good, it is the hone that sharpens the the poetic knife. I enjoy dissecting my beasts, sometimes to heal them, sometimes for the fun of it, and sometimes to build a better monster.
Most writing is never done–true. But for me, I get to a point that I have to move on. I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago, so revising a 10-year poem is difficult for me. But poems I’ve written two or three years ago I still feel connected to.
I like the idea of building a better monster.
Thanks for your comments, Donald and Nathan.
I must be an odd duck because I really enjoy the revision process, both for my fiction and my poetry. For me, revision is like taking a silver polishing cloth to a piece of tarnished jewelery. It does take emotional distance from a piece of writing to do effectively. For some pieces, a week is sufficient, others take longer for me to look at with the necessary objectivity. And although you really can’t separate the two, the first draft is where I pour out the art/emotion onto the page. The revision is where I apply the craft and discipline. (Though I am fairly guilty of revising as I write, particularly in my fiction.)
I think that the writing process (including revision) is going to be different for every writer. The important thing is to find a process that works and make it your own. I like the suggestions you make for looking at a piece in revision, January.
Good article!
best,
lisa
I enjoy revising my poetry but once a poem has been published I tend to consider it complete and rarely go back to revise published work though occasionally I have totally rewritten poems that have been published. This has lead to my one problem with blogging poetry, if I write a poem in response to a prompt then it is a first draft, but because its on my blog I feel its published and become reluctant to revise….
I absolutely loathe rewriting. I do it a lot before I post it, but afterward, I can’t seem to do it. I end up with something completely different that I don’t seem to like as much.
I do rewrite as I write, though, and I won’t post it if it’s something I can’t stand.
January, this is a great post. I appreciate your knowledge and your generous sharing of what you know. It’s also timely, after Napowrimo, with so many first drafts ready for molding and shaping. I intend to try many of the suggestions here.
I read a blog where the poet posted a “found” poem, a diary entry she had written twenty years ago, as a girl. I guess so much time had elapsed that she saw herself as a completely different writer. Interesting.
At some point we have to let our creations live a life of their own. We work on them, do all we can for them, but then we move on, just like we do with other aspects of our lives. I’d hate to be a writer who keeps pecking away at the same dog-eared manuscript.
jill and i were talking about this very subject tuesday at the coffee shop. although i hate to put words in her mouth (sometimes i’m good at it, though, ha ha), jill hates revising and credits it with wrecking some pretty decent initial instincts on her part. i always always always revise. heavily. usually, i am happier with the revision, but sometimes i lose important things in the revision. it’s sometimes intangible. jill will say, “you lost something between the first draft and this one.” and she’ll be right, but neither of us can point to anything specific.
i am reading now, the collected poems: sylvia plath. in the very first paragraph of the introduction, ted hughes writes, “to my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetric efforts. with one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair or even a toy. the end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.”
neither jill nor i was sure if the description is intended as a pat on the back or a criticism of plath, but for certain both of us could relate to the truce it seems plath called with revision. “a successful poem” being one that had done its job for us in that moment. perhaps the only reason to revise is if a poem isn’t doing its job or if there’s an obvious place where it could be made more effective. otherwise, perhaps, chairs and toys are just as worthy as tables. there are bound to be all of them in our bodies of work.
Ernest Hemingway said that “The first draft of anything is shit.” And it is. The first draft puts the skeleton down on paper. The flesh and veins and arteries and the skin come later, after much labour.
I tend to revise a lot, doing what everyone is suggesting above, ie reading aloud, casting the poem in a different tense or voice or perspective, until it feels right, credible. Then it’s time to go to work on it.
The first draft (in my case) will usually have more than a few adjectives and adverbs to help capture a mood/moment more easily. The rewriting and revising help me to keep that mood/moment without adjectives/adverbs and without poetics. That’s the hard part for me: the striving not to sound poetic (which I think certainly kills the poem).
Brilliant article, Jan. And interesting comments.
I said that a work is never really done but I didn’t mean to imply that I always pore over the same material. I don’t go back very much at all. What I meant was I know I could do new things if I did go back to certain pieces. Each work has its own time. Rilke worked on the Duino Elegies for what, ten years?
I recently started writing poetry again after a five year hiatus (mainly due to children, who I love more than poetry).
In my teens and twenties, I used to loathe revising and would rarely look at a poem again once it was on paper. When I became an editor in my late twenties, I loosened up a little and would maybe go over a poem once or twice.
Now, I really enjoy it. Sometimes I rewrite whole poems, sometimes I tweek a word here or there. Then I let it sit, then go again, sit, again, sit, again until I find contentment or feel defeated by the poem.
Defeat often leads to coming at the idea/image/thought again from a different angle. I never surrender.
This is a great discussion. Thanks for your thoughts on the revision process.
Keep those comments coming!
hey, january,
very interesting piece on a subject most writers must confront again and again at various stages of their writing life. thanks for writing it. what you’ve helped me understand about my own process is that i rarely use the term “revision” to describe what i do. this could be why i don’t have that allergic reaction many writers have to the idea of revising. i would describe my process on most poems (there are always exceptions, of course) in this way:
i have an idea that feels like a poem, so i get out my notebook and begin writing. if all goes well (i have time to devote to it, and my “muse” is with me) it builds and builds to something i usually call a complete draft. if i’m not lucky, what i’ve written is the beginning of a draft, or even notes to begin drafting from later — those i have to come back to (muse willing) until i finally get to the complete draft stage. this complete draft is often messy looking, with lines crossed out, words added in the margins, and plans for fixing problems that aren’t written down but held in my head. then (sometimes immediately, sometimes later) i go to the computer and type it in. lots of changes occur in this typing-in process. lots of decisions about line lengths, stanza shapes, line breaks, word choice, new images, etc., etc., etc., get made in the course of getting the complete draft into a word processing file. sometimes i “type in” 2 or 3 versions to compare. often the title first emerges at this stage. in other words, it could take me anywhere from a half-hour to a half-day (or more, in some cases) to “type in” the poem. at this point, in fact, i have gone from thinking of it as a complete draft to thinking of it as a poem. at that point, i might close it and come back to it later, when i need to send a submission out, or if i’m super excited about it or frustrated with it i might send it to a trusted friend or two for feedback. but sooner or later, i come back to it and do what i call “tweaking” — a word which covers a wide range of potential changes! then at some point, i look at it and say to myself that it is “done.” as far as i can tell, “done” just means ready for submission to journals or to be read to an audience.
but the kicker is that, like others who’ve commented here, even poems that are “done” continue to get “tweaked,” even after they’ve been initially published. i don’t know that there’s a statute of limitations on how long the tweaking can continue — it’s really a function of whether i feel satisfied that i’ve gotten the poem to the very best place i can get it, without it becoming another poem… and what’s funny is that at no point am i “revising” — it’s all “writing” or “working on” the poem, in terms of how i think of it!
i always write too much in your comments box, january — a testament not just to my long-windedness, but also to the thoughtfulness and thought-provokingness of your blog entries!
peace,
evie
I rarely go back to any of my poems. I simply move on to the next. As I have not published so revision is not as important for me. However, it does make a certain poem perfect.
Great discussion!
Before I write each poem, I have this awful fear that I either won’t be able to write anything or that what I write will be rubbish. What I get down on paper usually is pretty poor. I agree with Rehabille about first drafts. Once i transfer to the computer, it’s magical. The poem starts to take shape and I change words round, cut and paste away merrily. Unless the poem is going on my blog, I then follow one of January’s suggestions, putting it away before further editing. I like to experiment with point of view and tense. I don’t tend to use adverbs or adjectives, but like to make the verbs as strong as possible. I know that some poets like Bill Herbert, in the poetry section of ‘Creative Writing: A Workbook’ edited by Linda Anderson, look down their noses on poetry written on computers, but his way just doesn’t work for me. It’s only when I start tapping the keys that my brain gets into gear.
I once read an article in ‘New Writer’ by someone like me who doesn’t really like to do free writes. Apparently it’s something to do with personality. I do, however, use them if I’m stuck. NaPoWriMo was great for me as it actually got me doing the hardest bit, which is starting to write. I’ve now got 30 poems to work on. For me the crafting is the essence of writing a poem.
I’ve only had two poems accepted for publication. (Sending them off is almost as difficult as starting to write them!) Both of these were written whilst doing an Open University creative writing course, and both were worked on extensively.
I don’t have anything against writing on a computer, I’m just more comfortable with pen and paper. I can carry it around in my pocket and work on it when there’s a spare minute.
For me, writing poetry is like a chess game in the sense that I have to juggle different things in my head at the same time. It’s just easier for me to map things out with a pen.
Prose also has its complexities but I prefer to write it on a computer. I find that larger amounts of text are easier to handle electronically.
Nathan, I, do a tremendous amount in my head too, in between sessions on the computer. I just find it easier to go to the computer although I agree that a notebook in the pocket would be useful if I could remember to take it with me.
I am an endless reviser. When I post I often go back in 10 or 20 times to change a phrase or a word. Only when I can finally “live” with the piece can I move on. It’s the same with my artwork. The ultimate criteria being the “can I live with it?” one, meaning not shudder, groan, or feel that the thought is incomplete.
Currently I am still in the ‘put it all in’ mode and allow myself to mix styles, from academic discourse to imagistic poetry.
But that makes revising more difficult! What “works” is an intuitive appraisal since it’s not the kind of ‘poetry writing’ I was taught in workshops many years ago.
It has to feel as if different levels are being included and that not everything is neat and tidy, a little messy is important, something rather wild and unpruned.
Sometimes I edit to make it ill-fitting, awkward!
Thank you for this reminder on the importance of working at our writing - in this world of hitting “post” something that maybe we don’t do enough of.
RE: revision, I can’t conceive of writing without it, I admit. I tend to think of the first draft as spilling a pile of bricks onto the foundation. It’s only in subsequent drafts that I feel like I’m able to build something from the pile. Sometimes I get lucky on a first draft and the bricks fall out into a pleasing pattern, easy to straighten the edges and dust off and walk away from, and sometimes there’s no sorting them… but I always make at least an attempt to tackle the pile, wielding trowel and mortar.