Lately I've been trying to rework my capstone poems, and to be honest, I'm not making a ton of progress. I often have this problem when revising poetry--I feel semi-okay about my first draft, but when I try to reenter the poem to make improvements, I just can't find the inspiration. It's like I'm trying to touch up a watercolor painting with oil pastels--the end result is patchy and inconsistent, as though it's been created by two different artists.
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Not this kind of tinkering.
Though let's face it, this would
probably be more fun. |
I'm attempting to do two different kinds of revision for my poems: tweaking/tinkering with my "Shopping with My Mother" piece, which was slightly more polished, and practically taking apart the other, which needed a different direction altogether. (Yep, the alliteration was intentional. I'm very cool.) Both types of revision, I'm discovering, are equally difficult. Obviously, it's hard to basically start from scratch--I mean, where do you even begin? But minor editing is challenging too. It can feel like you're simply slapping Band-Aids onto open wounds--the changes stand out in an ugly way, and they don't even really fix the problems in the first place.
I guess my biggest issue here is cohesion--creating a common tone throughout the poem, a common thread tying everything together. For some reason, I have a really hard time doing that when I'm revising. I'm not very good at stepping back from the poem and reading it with fresh eyes to see if it makes sense. Instead, I wind up either inserting new images that turn out to be irrelevant and/or off-tone given the rest of the piece (if I'm tweaking/tinkering) or taking a few of my favorite lines and trying--futilely--to make them flow fluidly in a new poem (if I'm taking apart). As a result, my poems often end up feeling a little superficial--feeling
almost perfect, but not quite (cue Shel Silverstein).
How do you guys handle the revision process for poetry? How do you enter back into the world you created in the first draft? Any tips for tweaking, tinkering, or taking apart a poem?
I’ve often compared revising poems to open-heart surgery on a hummingbird, so I know exactly what you’re talking about here. My winter poem is undergoing small, tiny changes—trying to figure out how to say “stare past standing skeletons” without turning into a tongue twister—but I’ve had the complete rewrite problem as well. My main type would be to save any lines you cut or tweak in a separate document, so you can reinsert them if you change your mind. I did that a lot with my Advanced Writer’s Workshop pieces.
ReplyDeleteAs for keeping it coherent—I’d say imagine the poem as a snapshop or a thumbnail sketch. What would that sketch look like? Would it be a small scene, or just one person? This tip isn’t helpful for more landscape-of-the-mind pieces; in which case it’d be better to think about emotions. What emotion are you trying to put in the piece? For example, my winter poem focuses on isolation and alienation, the poetic version of “people weren’t made for six-plus months of snow!”
So true! There is something about poetry, more than personal essay, that is hard to re-enter into. Maybe that's because it's more of a an expression and reflection of a certain mental/emotional state in a particular moment than a recounting of events preserved by their being in the past. I think that is why I often end up, like you said, layering on more images, because I'm afraid that my efforts to edit the images I already have will stand out too glaringly.
ReplyDeleteI think, for me, I've had to learn not to rely too much on whether or not I FEEL (sorry for the CAPS...I don't know how to use italics on Blogger) like it's coming across too "patchy" or not. Sometimes, when I feel like I'm massacring while I'm revising it, I can come back later and see that it really did improve it. I think we authors are sometimes too prone to think that we must get in some sort of special zone to be able to produce good writing/revisions, which isn't always true.
Besides that, I really like Julie's tip to identify consciously the theme and tone you had captured in the last draft so you can reenter it.
I totally relate/agree with you, Sarah! For me, a good way to re-enter the poem is to get as much feedback from others as possible. Since they do have objective eyes and they aren't emotionally attached to the words of draft one, I find they are able to give me a better appreciation for what the poem is and where it could go. But even still, it's hard to work with so many possibilities!
ReplyDeleteMy second major revision on my Italy poem turned out to be practically rewriting the whole thing while still trying to stick with the same image. Even if this is not what I expected, maybe it was needed. I find that picking out a few central images and sticking with those is helpful for creating a new piece, but, of course, you have to worry about becoming attached to them if that's your method. I agree with you; there are so many gray areas!