A Poet's Journal: Revision

Recently I wrote a guest post for my friend Elizabeth’s blog, where I described the way I organize and submit my writing.

Assembling that instructional post made me start thinking of my poetry practice, and the many, many steps I take before a poem is published on a website or printed in a journal. Having an index of all my writing helps me to edit my work and see it grow over time, which includes revisions.

This is the last day of National Poetry Writing Month. Throughout April, I write one poem each day, and I don’t revise any of them until the month is up. Some of my poems, I revise in workshops, while others see adjustments based on friends’ feedback. Then there are some I revise completely alone, that most of my friends never see until they’re published somewhere.

Poetry is often regarded as an especially opaque form of writing. A lot of people around me have said that they’re mystified by poetry or are never quite sure what to make of it. That extends to poets, too; in one poetry workshop I took, the very first handout was simply titled “POEM?!?!?!?!?!?!?” and the very first line read, “Poems are not code for something else.” What is a poem? Well, it’s sure as hell not prose! Except when it is.

All of this to say, poetry is confusing, whether you’re writing or reading it, and I think that’s why a lot of people balk at doing either. Or they write a poem and then never revisit it, out of embarrassment or apprehension. If you think writing a poem is hard, try revising one, ew.

I thought it might be fun to close out NaPoWriMo by sharing a poem here on the blog. This was a NaPoWriMo 2021 poem, and in its first iteration, it looked like this.

Short, Sharp, Bloody Unforgiveness
I have earned my knife.
My sawtooth bona fides,
my irredeemable edge.
One tendon, severed,
other leg stumbling.
To hold a whole life
while wading through blood?
I never thought I’d change.
Your meat in my teeth—
victory, swollen with sunrot,
gluts my tongue, bitter tang
of lives I’ve taken.
No hands, legs, lips, breast 
clean enough to cauterize you.
I offered an out,
a way unwounded.
You insisted on repaying
what was never a debt.
So rarely do I kill what I catch.
You must be something special.
Damnit, I’m cannibalizing again.
It’s best for you
to look away while I finish.

…where the hell did that come from? Great question, dear reader! When I write a poem, it almost always sprouts from 1 to 3 phrases that pop into my head and stay there until I get them on a page. In this instance, those phrases were my irredeemable edge, swollen with sunrot, and You insisted on repaying what was never a debt. After revising this poem, all three of those phrases made it from the first draft to the final one (which you’ll see in a few paragraphs)! 

Sometimes those “anchor phrases” don’t survive the revision process, and that’s okay. When I choose to excise one of them from a poem, I “preserve” the phrase by writing it on a Post-It and sticking it to my file cabinet. If my writing tools were a moral alignment chart, The Index would be lawful good, and my file cabinet would be chaotic good.

So, when I wrote this poem, I had those three phrases stuck in my head and needed to put them into…something. Generally speaking, when I write a poem, I’m trying to capture a specific emotion. I don’t always remember what circumstances lead to a poem, but generally, I can recall the feeling I had while writing it. In this case, it was the feeling of being correct about something I did not want to be right about, a sort of “I told you so!” poem. Along with having an emotion like that in mind, I also usually have an image that I hold in my head while I write. Frequently, that’s a movie or TV clip. Sometimes it's a memory of something I did or saw. More recently it’s just been things I see on the street or in social settings.

In this case, it was the NBC romantic drama Hannibal. Sorry! I love that show! I love the Tumblr accounts dedicated to posting gifsets of the show, I love the 75k+ word fanfictions, I love the various Hannibal-inspired playlists on the internet! When I first started doing NaPoWriMo in 2016, I never would have DREAMED of revealing which of my poems were inspired by TV or movies. But now I’m pretty open about it. You can even see a direct reference to cannibalism in the first draft of this poem. I think that taking those vibrant, on-screen images, and transforming them into poems about my own feelings and experiences, results in a poem that is more relatable and powerful for the reader.

So, I wrote this poem, which had the title Short, Sharp, Bloody Unforgiveness, in April 2021. Then, in a poetry workshop, I took notes and made edits and it turned into this.

Ravening
I have earned my knife.
My sawtooth bona fides,
my irredeemable edge.
Name it:
the slender tendon you believe
will hold your whole life 
wading through blood.
So rarely do I kill what I catch.
You must be something special.
Meat gleams in my teeth.
Victory, swollen with sunrot,
gluts my tongue—bitter tang
of lives I’ve taken.
Despite my prized bleached heat, no hand, leg, lip, or breast 
will cleanly cauterize you.
I offered an out,
a way unwounded.
You insisted on repaying
what was never a debt.
Only prudes deny the pleasure 
of braving the imminent brim.
It’s best for you to look 
away while I finish.

Those first three lines stayed the same. But then, in the fourth line, I replace a fairly abstract image with an imperative phrase, “Name it,” a command that addresses the listener directly. In both versions of this poem, the narrator is speaking to an unidentified you, but I think the revised version of this poem is strengthened by establishing that earlier. 

I also take what was posed as a question in the first draft, change the meaning, and instead assign it as a belief held by the person this narrator is addressing. When I workshopped this poem, people in my little cohort really liked that phrase "So rarely do I kill what I catch," and questioned why it landed so late in the poem. 

Moving it higher in the poem did two things. One, it gave the phrase more of a taunting air – it comes earlier, when the threatening nature of the speech is still present but we haven't actually seen that much gore – and two, it acts as a transition, turning the "you" from a person into "something." 

This allowed me to change "your meat in my teeth" to "meat gleams in my teeth," dehumanizing and disassociating the subject of the poem. And that "ea" sound is repeated which looks great on the page, and comes back in a few lines: "bleached heat," "breast/will cleanly.”

We spend the middle part of this poem in what I think of as "the meat space," where our narrator is just listing body parts and sensations like they're placing an order at a deli. Then, we ease the subject back into this dialogue – the person who insists "on repaying what was never a debt." These last six lines in the revised poem are pretty direct. We don't get the narrator going into a short soliloquy the way they did in the first draft with "Damnit, I'm cannibalizing again." 

Instead, in those final six lines, we see a direct address of the subject, followed by a phrase that echoes the first few lines – an "irredeemable edge" and an "imminent brim" both evoke a precipice, with violence on one or both sides (in other words, the series finale of Hannibal!).

Can you see the difference in those last two lines? They're the same text, but the line breaks are different. I did that for two reasons. I wanted the length of the lines to flow better, to go from a long line to a shorter one, letting the poem sort of taper off at the end. 

And generally speaking, I like ending a line with an infinitive more than I like beginning a line with an infinitive. I like breaking a line after an infinitive because it opens the next line to a lot of possibilities. “It's best for me to look”... what, dear narrator? Until I read that next line, the answer could be anything! I also think having an infinitive at the end of the line propels you more naturally to the next line than ending with a noun or adjective. This is 100 percent a personal style choice. Your mileage may vary!

So, that’s how you revise a poem. Well, no. That’s how I revised this poem. Every poem is going to be different, but there are principles you can apply regardless of what you want to accomplish. 

Who is the poem addressing, or about, and how early do you introduce that person? Where are the actions on the page, and do they propel you towards more action, or take you somewhere else? How do the words look and sound – are you rhyming? If you’re not, are you finding other sounds that you can replicate within your lines? Do earlier stanzas “match” or mirror later ones?

The revised version of this poem, Ravening, was shortlisted for a poetry prize, which was pretty cool for me. Writing poetry is something I do for fun. Revising is something I do to get better...and in turn, have more fun. And if you decide to write or revise some poems today, I hope you have fun, too!