read write prompt #73: revision

by Deb Scott

Here we are, the first Friday of May, blessed May, especially for those who participated — wholly or in part — with the April madness that is NaPoWriMo. (I promise I won’t use that moniker again in this post.)

How do we follow all those glorious poems “the madwomen standing outside the supermarket door shoving poems into unsuspecting shoppers’ pockets” prompted us to write?

We revise. That is this week’s prompt: revise one of your poems.

Go over your work of the last month (more or less) and sort it into piles — an actual pile is best, but virtual will do — so you end up with a group of poems that have something in them you like. Pick out one that is at least a week old and pick over it. (Maybe you select your third favorite to start with, as a warm up.)

Go ahead. Revise away. If you have been at this a while, you probably know what to do. If you are a newish poet (like me) maybe you need a little help, some pointers, a place to start. Here are a few ideas:

• Make a copy. Set aside the original. That way you can do all kinds of things to it, knowing if you go too far that the initial poem is still available. (You want to try to go too far, because often we are  over-protective of our poetry children.) The key is to find ways to let yourself become detached enough from the poem so you can dig into it and do some deep revision, if that is what the poem needs.

• Read your poem aloud. Read it aloud again. Get a friend to read it to you. Or, if you are too self-conscious for that, make a recording of it yourself and play it back. Send yourself a voice mail. (Most of us dislike our voices. Get over it. Your poetry needs you to say it out loud.)

• Where does the poem really start? Often we rev our poet-engines for a while, make some noise, then get to the poem. See if you did that, and cut extraneous stuff. Sometimes the heart of the poem is in the middle, or there is one phrase that “makes it” an interesting, or potentially interesting, poem. Rewrite the poem starting from that point.

• Look at every single verb and see if it is doing its job. Is there another word that would evoke more feeling, surprise you, sound better? Look for adverbs; most writers want those to go away. (If you need an adverb to clarify a verb, then you are probably not using the right verb to begin with.)

• Scrutinize the nouns and pronouns. Are they concrete? (Most beginners are too abstract. Modern American poetry readers love to be put smack dab in the middle of a particular scene by specific detail(s).)

• Can you improve the sound of the poem? Add slant rhymes?

• Write your lines backwards. The the whole poem backwards. This process reveals things you haven’t noticed before. Push it through a translator (such as Babel Fish) and then back again.

If you want more revision tips, look no further than last June’s post by January where she gave us quite a few concrete tips for revising our work. Or look at Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers. Robert Lee Brewer at Poetic Asides (who ran the PAD challenge) has a few tips of his own, and I bet more will be added as he progresses with his own slug of PAD poems!

For additional discussions on revision, there’s an interview with Martin Lammon called “Flying Revisions Flag,” originally published in Kestral in 1993, by Donald Hall. The Naropa Poetics Audio Archives has a Allen Ginsberg class on revising autobiographical poems (Oct. 10, 1983).

Even LuLu (the POD publisher) has a series of articles on revising poetry.

Good old craft books are always a terrific idea. Getting off the computer and onto paper, with a nearby book turned to helpful ideas, is useful. I like Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. I especially like Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets and plan on reading the whole thing again this month.

Do you have a trick? Something that works for you? Tell us in the comments below.

Then come back next Thursday and give us a new version of one of your old poems. (Or, if you just can’t stand the idea of revision, write us a poem about May Day. But try your hand at revision. It’s a good thing to do for your poems.)