Minneapolis Convention Center | April 10, 2015

Episode 117: Where We Begin to Revise the Poem

(Peter Campion, Erica Dawson, James Harms, John Hoppenthaler, Keetje Kuipers) This panel will provide very specific revision strategies for use in the poetry workshop. Revision at the level of the word, the line, the sentence, and the stanza will be highlighted. Each panelist will provide three favorite points of revision, with each point contributing toward an understanding of the sort of shaping and negotiation that goes beyond mere editing, the sort that students ought to be engaged in as they prepare their portfolios and continue on in a life of poetry making.

Published Date: March 2, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Peter Campon, Erica Dawson, James Harms, John Hoppen, Thaler, and Kechi. You will now hear John Hoppen Thaler provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Good afternoon everybody. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 2 (00:00:36):

I'm going to introduce us all in the order that will be appearing and my name's John Hop Bealer. I'm the author of three books of Poetry, lies of Water, anticipate the Coming Reservoir and the recently Released Domestic Garden. I've also co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Gene Valentine, this world company, and I'm an associate professor of creative writing and literature at East Carolina University Ketch Kuper. On my right here was the Marjorie Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, and the emerging writer lecturer at Gettysburg College. Her two books include Beautiful in the Mouth and Keys to the Jail. She's an assistant professor at Auburn University where she's also the editor of Southern Humanities Review. Peter Campion. To my left here is the author of three collections of poetry, other people, the Lions and El Dorado. He's the recipient of a Pushkar Prize, the Larry Levi Reading Prize, the Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he directs the M F A program here at the University of Minnesota. On the far left is James Harms. He's the author of eight books of Poetry most recently Comet Scar and What to Borrow, what to Steal.

Speaker 2 (00:01:59):

His awards include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three Pushkar Prizes, and he teaches in the M F A program at West Virginia University. And to my far right is Erica Dawson. She's the author of two books of Poetry, big Eyed Afraid, and the Small Blades Hurt. Her poems have appeared in Best of American Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review and the Harvard Review, and she is currently the acting director of the M F A program at the University of Tampa. So while I'm up here, I'll go first.

Speaker 2 (00:02:37):

The notion of free verse suggests that a poet is free to turn the line, to break it wherever she wishes. However, those of us lucky enough to enjoy freedom realize that if anything, liberty paradoxically creates the obligation of greater attention to decisions, even more consideration of where and why one decides to move from one line to the next. We tend to spend a lot of workshop time talking about line breaks, yet most of us, I think spend much less time deciding how each line should begin. How should we begin? Anri Matisse speaks of the use of the line in painting by noting one must always search for the desire of the line where it wishes to enter, where to die away.

Speaker 2 (00:03:29):

In an interview I did with Michael Waters some years ago, he said a few things that struck me and have been part of my approach to writing poems to this day. He said, if you think in terms of painting, in terms of background and foreground, then apply that to language. You see that there are these words, nouns and verbs, especially adjectives always in the foreground of the poem. The pronouns, articles and prepositions often remain in the background. I can show a poem to my students. Let's say the first quaran has the word wood stove in it three times, and I can say to them what word is repeated in this stanza? And they'll say, wood stove. And I'll say, how about the, that shows up six times.

Speaker 2 (00:04:18):

This comment is applicable to the poem as a whole, but I'd like to consider now how this might also be applied specifically to line beginnings. How frequently did the lines begin with prepositional phrases, articles, conjunctions, or even the pronoun I? The answer is a lot. How much consideration is given this fact in the revision process by most young people or most older people? For that matter, not so much. But if in a perfect world we want every word in a poem to matter, shouldn't we spend at least as much time considering line beginnings as we do line breaks? Line beginnings are as much a point of emphasis as line breaks are. And I'm not saying that every line break should not begin with an article conjunction, prepositional phrase or the pronoun I. In an interview I attempted to engage Steven Bird on this issue and he countered lots of great lines begin with prepositional phrases, articles, or conjunctions, and he's right.

Speaker 2 (00:05:22):

But my point is, and it's the point I try to make to my students, we can do better than not think at all of how a few less lines that begin with these words might positively affect a poem's vitality. So say I have a student with a 12 line poem where most of the lines begin with uninteresting words of the sort that we tend to relegate to the background of language. It may well also be that the poem reads rather flatly because each line is end stopped and the language of the poem therefore exhibits little surprise or fluidity. I ask that student to consider other possibilities to take more responsibility for both the break and the next line's beginning. So let's get back to Matisse's idea about align's desire. Since to my mind, poetry is closely linked to visual arts like painting, sculpture, and film.

Speaker 2 (00:06:14):

This is a useful if romantic notion desire, it seems to me is sharp and often feels dangerous like the naked blade of a knife, insisting its gleaming self via its tangible body. If as a general goal, we attempt to begin the preponderance of our lines with seductive verbs, arresting adjectives and tangible nouns, these lines begin with the sharp blade of desire. The readers quickly pulled into the line, and I think this is true in the case of those lines beginning that follow end stop lines as well as those that follow end jammed lines and these unnecessarily cloak, such powerful words with gauze in the form of an article say and reduces the power of that line. In total. Of course, consideration of line beginnings works hand in hand with consideration of line breaks. For example, a poem of mine that appears in the current Great River Review begins like this, stretched through the narrow canyon of side yards, line break, bedroom, window to bedroom, window between line break limbs and over their parents' small gardens.

Speaker 2 (00:07:28):

And the poem second line. I've made the deliberate choice to break the line on the preposition between I could have as easily chosen the default clause as a third line between oak limbs and over their parents' small gardens. However, by hanging the preposition at the end of the second line, I accomplished two things. First, I create suspense momentum as the reader must go to the next line to complete the clause. Second, I begin the next line with a quickly accessible, highly visual image that helps sustain creation and helps the reader into the next line without buffer.

Speaker 2 (00:08:08):

So 0.2 of revision. On my first day of class, I talk about things that might distinguish poetry from prose. One of the features we talk about is the fact that in poetry we value a sonic texture we might call music. John Logan insisted. A poem is not a poem unless it has an essential surface to it, which is musical and character. Humans have an affinity for patterns and music also seems to be related to very primal parts of the brain. Our bodies cannot help but react physiologically to musical input. I used the first stands of Robert Frost stopping by Woods on a snowy evening as a way to get into the topic whose woods these are. I think I know his house is in the village. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.

Speaker 2 (00:09:02):

We talk about the obvious first. It's a formal poem with a rhyme scheme and the end rhyme and frost use of IIC hitter begins to form the sonic profile of the stanza rhyme and rhythm. But there's more to it. There's sound and repetition in the stanza. There are seven W w h sounds whose woods no will watch woods with snow assonance as well long E sounds course through the third line of the quaran, putting emphasis on he C and me. There's also internal rhyme in near rhyme in the stanza, Phil will and even the first three letters of village. What's the effect of this musical score of all those W w H sounds in particular? I ask since it's the first day it's common. No one will speak up. So I ask, where is the poem set? This begins to expand the discussion into the consideration of exposition and what tends to go on there. In literature, we typically are offered setting as we are here, but what is an expectation is that tone will be established then loudly I go and I wait. Uncomfortable silence. I ask again, where is our speaker located and what is going on? Well, it's the woods, it's winter, oh, the sound of wind through the branches and over mounds of snow

Speaker 2 (00:10:45):

And the speakers alone. How does such music make one feel when he's alone in a stark landscape? A little depressed, a little mournful. Voila. Tone is said. So I tell them the exposition is a site where statement or action might fruitfully be wedded with sound and rhythm to create a kind of gestalt. Then I have to say what gestalt means. We go on from there to discuss the ways in which a poet manipulates the reader and how such manipulation is common to all literary and artistic forms. Take the movie jaws. I say we know the sharks a fake. In fact, his name's Bruce. There were two of them.

Speaker 2 (00:11:27):

Yet how is it that we're seduced forgetting this truth as we slide into the film? How is it that we willingly suspend our disbelief? Part of the answer is music. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun. We are seduced by the music's throbbing intensity. So as part of my student's revision regimen, their poem are required to have at least one draft in which they examine musical texture. It's not necessary that all of a poem's sound work be directly linked to meaning. Sometimes the pleasure of sound is enough, but I want them to be conscious of a poem's music and its value as it works in concert with language to create a poem with facets and dimension. And this works hand in hand with what I mentioned earlier about bringing as much of the language as possible into the foreground, making each word matter. Here's Michael Waters from that same interview. What William Carlos Williams does with his triadic line. Seamus Heney, for example, does with sound with rhyme, where he'll take a three syllable word and rhyme it with a prepositional phrase consisting of one syllable words in the context of a deca syllabic line discotech with off the lake.

Speaker 2 (00:12:47):

So when reading it, one has to pronounce to the preposition, pronounce the article, and then the noun and bring that language forward in order for that rhyme to function properly. Elizabeth Bishop accomplishes such foregrounding with while his guilds were breathing in the terrible oxygen 0.3, believe it or not, college students today, even graduate students who supposedly teach this stuff are not notable for their keen grasp of grammar. Many, and I do mean many lack much of an understanding about what a sentence is or that a sentence is a flexible thing. Therefore, their papers are strewn with sentence fragments, comma splices and run-on sentences when they write poetry. It's even worse as it's easy for even an experienced poet to lose sight of her sentences and early drafts of a poem, A point where the associative power of sound and synapse ought to be in charge of composition, not the editor. I think I'm drawn these days to the couplet because it allows me to keep better track of my sentences as does a longer stanza. In any case, many of us frequently find ourselves as we prepare for the next day's workshop, trying to make sense of constructions that claim to be sentences but are not.

Speaker 2 (00:14:09):

Here's one from a recent student poem. In my class this semester is one sentence flowing down the rapids of bourbon In a chilled glass, I walk up to the glossy oakwood bar that catches the condensation. His eyes dart to the side as he sighs a face. He has seen time and time again worry or this one from a poem in my class earlier this week, bare feet and rolled pant legs left. Im printed tracks of afternoon's harvest.

Speaker 2 (00:14:41):

My syllabus requires students to use punctuation in their poems. If I don't, it's been my experience that many will not. I suspect this is because most of them have little idea how to use punctuation, not because they want to emulate Lucille Clifton, but even if it's because they do want to emulate Lucille Clifton. I point out how Lucille carefully constructed her lines to avoid confused syntax, how she frequently used white spaces, punctuation, how the students own poem is a confusing muddle that causes a reader to stop and try to make sense of things several times as he moves down the page. How this unintentionally works against the reader's passage towards full engagement with the poem, how punctuation is one of a poet's most useful tools.

Speaker 2 (00:15:29):

Anyway. I also tell my students that Annie Dillard has likened the sensation of writing a sentence at its worst to alligator a wrestling. I tell them that my favorite definition of poetry comes from Tom Robbins novel. Even cowgirls Get the blues quote. Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature. Until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the great order of love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax,

Speaker 2 (00:16:12):

I empathize and let them know that I know how hard it is to write a good sentence, not just one that's clear, but one that's luminous. I ask my students as one of their required revisions to write out one or two of their poems sentence by sentence with one of these. I sometimes have them work in pairs and switch poems. Then they have to get out the grammar text and see if these sentences, these sequences of words and punctuation marks before them actually are sentences. If not, they have to make them sentences that are clear and make sense. Then I ask 'em to rewrite each sentence three ways. Finally, I ask them to reassemble their poem using the palette of possible sentence structures they have now created. Inevitably, the poems get better. At the very least, it forces students to understand that there's more than one way to construct a sentence and that therefore there are also alternate ways to arrange words within Allan and in the end, after all, isn't it part of my mission as an English teacher to teach students how to write with clarity and precision? Whether I'm teaching composition literature or poetry writing, my chair thinks so.

Speaker 2 (00:17:27):

Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:17:36):

I don't think I've ever been on a panel at a w p where I had to really be prepared before. So this is a new experience for me and I am not going to have as beautifully a composed presentation as John just gave us, but I hope is interesting. I recently asked the poet Roque to do a Skype interview with the students in my Writing America class, and one of the things that I think undergraduate poets often ask published poets is What are your poems about? And this question of about, and I think a lot of poets sort of bristle like, oh, you're going to make me give you some little narrative now. But the way Ross answered that question was really interesting, and he said that whenever he's working on a single poem or a collection of poems, he's thinking about what is the question that he's trying to answer for himself?

Speaker 3 (00:18:34):

And we had read his book Bringing the Shovel Down, and he said, and I'm just paraphrasing here, he said something to the effect of answering a question about as Americans, our complicity and violence both within our own country and internationally, and the way he talked about answering that question reminded me of how I feel when I am working on my own poems. And I don't think of it as a question, but I think of it as an argument, and I think that's something again, that a lot of poets would sort of bristle against this idea of conscious rhetoric in a poem. But I think that whether a poem is a narrative or a lyric or none of the above, it's making an argument of one kind or another. And I don't mean something so trite or simplistic as seize the day, or don't take the people that you love for granted or anything like that, but instead an emotional argument, an argument for the sensation of loss, for the experience of frailty.

Speaker 3 (00:19:35):

There's always some sort of argument at the heart of any poem. So when we are workshopping poems in my classes, a lot of times what I want to hear from my students first is not what the poem is about because that, as I'm sure we all know, is a really dead end conversation in a poetry workshop. But instead, what is the argument that the poem is making, the emotional argument. And then after we've established that for ourselves or at least got some ideas of what that is, then I like to direct my students to think about something. A wonderful phrase that my graduate mentor Garrett Congo used in our workshop, the Meic complex autonomy and metaphor for those of you who are trying to jog your memories about what a metonym is, we all know what a metaphor is. Autonomy is when a part stands in for the whole.

Speaker 3 (00:20:34):

So the example that everybody always gives is when you're talking about the royalty and you call them the crown, right? So that would be an example of a mey, but I think about it in poetry. Autonomy is not about this thing is like that thing, but instead about connection and linkage. And so the way Garrett talks about the menon complex is that every single part of the poem, whether it's a noun or an adjective or syntax, the way that those nouns and adjectives and verbs are put together, that should all be working towards the argument that the poem is making. If the argument the poem is making is an argument about frailty, then there's no part of that poem that shouldn't be making that argument. So I think the things that I think about are how diction provides layers of manon possibility, particularly with adjectives and syntax.

Speaker 3 (00:21:30):

I think those are the things that I go to first. Now, I could have brought in one of my students' poems and ripped it apart in front of you, but instead I decided to bring you a poem of mine that is in draft and I'm still working on it. It has a lot of problems and I want to sort of point out the places where I hope it's working or that menon complex is working and where it's not yet. So this is that poem. I buy my white daughter a black doll, and it cries and it sleeps and it rides through our kitchen in a pink stroller. It takes a tiny bottle in its pursed lips, and every night it takes a bubble bath as my daughter drapes a washcloth across its brown shoulders and down the delicately curved back. I think about his elbows, his knees, those ashy places I caressed without understanding and how his mother told me that one cold winter, I called him mine to make sure he moisturized as if she agreed I had any business caretaking that body as if I could protect it from what she knew might come before bed.

Speaker 3 (00:22:39):

I'd ask him to lift his arms above his head so I could run my open palms along his limbs. Not that he didn't deserve it, not that every body doesn't deserve to be touched tenderly by an other, not that we can't all be transformed by our own unknowing love. So the parts of that poem that I don't think are working in terms of a menon complex are the adjectives that one cold winter, I called him mine. Well, I hope it was cold. I mean, I know global warming is a thing, but not only does that word not add anything to our idea of winter, but it has no relation to what this poem is about. So if this poem is about an attempt at understanding at an attempt at human connection, then the word that describes the winter needs to do something to activate that idea in the poem or to work directly against that idea.

Speaker 3 (00:23:47):

In contrast, other adjectives that the delicately curved back again, this is description just filling space. It is not doing anything to activate the ideas in the poem. I think the parts of the poem that are working with this Manon complex is the syntax. Some of the phrases, so phrases like the winter, he was mine. I could have said the winter I loved him. The winter we were lovers. The winter we spent together, the winter he was mine is important because it calls up ideas of ownership that this poem is working against. Not that he didn't deserve it. Again, this is a phrase that calls up the idea of all the violence that's perpetrated against people of color and this ingrained idea of what those people deserve, right? And so this poem is working against that arms above his head, right? Put your arms up. I didn't run my hands along his legs. This is important, right? So all of those pieces, again, they're not emphasizing what the poem is about. They're pressing against what the poem is making an argument for. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:25:20):

I am Peter Campion. I want to thank John for putting this panel together and thank the other panelists. It's a real pleasure to share this time and to listen to poets whose work I admire so much. I also want to acknowledge that right behind us on this, somebody has written blood marriage, sex, money, so if you don't get anything from this panel, these are some good themes and if you have any help for me with the final one, that others pretty much covered. Okay, thank you. I want to give a description of revision to show what I think this thing we call the revision process actually is. And since this is an audience of writers, I assume I also want to offer one suggestion about revision. The description begins at a moment that was clarifying or at least generatively complicating for me a moment in 2004, one afternoon when I was visiting my friend, the painter, Mitchell Johnson at his studio in Menlo Park, California.

Speaker 4 (00:26:34):

At the time I was beginning to write and publish about painting. It was necessary to admit all that was lost on me, which was a lot, and to ask plenty of questions. Every visit to an artist's studio was a back and forth an exploration and not merely an occasion to look, evaluate, and record. The mysterious splendid subject was present in front of me. The task was to get a feel for that subject as entirely as possible and then give it shape and language as if placing bandages on the invisible man beneath the excitement of this new art writing project lay a certain frustration. I'd finished my first book of poems a year earlier and was now waiting for it to come out happy enough, except that for some reason I hadn't felt able to write a single poem in that whole year. That afternoon in the studio something happened, a small thing which intensified everything for me getting ready to leave.

Speaker 4 (00:27:42):

I watched Mitchell approach one of his paintings in progress with a bold in one hand, which contained little circles of color paper. He picked one up with his fingertip, licked it and stuck it to the painting. This picture was from a series of northern California landscapes. Mitchell took photos on site sketched, and he even started painting canvases there on site that he loaded into his Chevy truck, but he changed these paintings in the studio. The forms of houses or Douglas furs of sagebrush hillsides or junker cars shifted and reformed like so much putty. He told me that when he placed a dot of paper on a painted form that afternoon, it was the turquoise roof of a barn. He was testing what new interactions between the various hues and tones those little bits of color would suggest he learned the specific trick from the painter's.

Speaker 4 (00:28:42):

Nell Blaine and Leland Bell, two of his teachers at Parsons in New York, he thought this painting wouldn't be finished. It looked perfectly done to me until that roof rooftop really popped. He wanted the shape to take on its own life to lock into the whole arrangement of the picture plane and yet to vibrate outward as a real thing in the world. In the case of writing poems, we're used to thinking of our work as internal. A poem stems from our emotions and thoughts, private experiences. The actual physical process of writing is more or less provisional. Any one piece of paper or any one computer file as a temporary placeholder more than a site of the actual work. Seeing Mitchell place those luminous dots on the canvas and then step back to check how the color is now trembled. I was faced with an opposite truth. You're subject and your rendering of your subject must push back. They must always be external.

Speaker 4 (00:29:49):

I think this is true, even if you maintain that romantic view of poetry as an internal process, words worth spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, and even if your subject is yourself. When Ilka first saw one of Cezanne's self portraits in Paris in October of 1907, he wrote to his wife, Clara, how great and incorruptible was that objectivity of his gaze. It's confirmed by the circumstance that he reproduced himself with the fidelity and objectively interested involvement of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks there's another dog. The self becomes another. For me at least. This calls up Rambo's famous letter to Paul Deman in May of 1871. For I as someone else, for I as someone else, if brass wakes up a trumpet, it's not its fault to me. This is obvious. I witnessed the unfolding of my thought, wrote Rambo. I watch it.

Speaker 4 (00:31:01):

I listened to it in his essay. Some notes on the gazer within Larry Levis addresses this fusion of internal and external in terms of the growth of young contemporary poets. He writes that to find a subject is also simultaneously and reflexively the act and art by which anyone finds himself or herself. A poet finds what he or she is by touching what is out there, finding the real. I love how those two seemingly opposed actions finding oneself and leaving oneself to explore out there, combine in all these views, and I think this is precisely what happens when we revise. We try to get objective stances outside of ourselves to look in at our subjective life from outside. At the same time, like my friend Mitchell with his painting, we try to bring those objective colors and shapes and hues into the solution of what it is that we subjectively imagine that hole needs to be.

Speaker 4 (00:32:09):

It's a kind of paradox like that phrase, it was a favorite idiom of Emerson's part and parcel. The part is contained in the whole and vice versa. I think this is what makes revision both beveling and wondrous in addition to the subject and the poet itself. There's another place where this encounter incurs. I mean the medium itself language. As a poet, you need to be as complete a master of language possible. You need to feel each word, each syllable, each morphine for its quality. But this is part and parcel of allowing the medium your language, its own life apart from its merely representative function. As Keisha was saying about this phrase, what is the poem about? Apart from its merely representative function, the media must be allowed to push back. You want to feel for its plasticity. You want to take any given sentence as John was saying, and try to begin it from different points from the subject or the verb or the object.

Speaker 4 (00:33:14):

You want to see what happens when you load it with relative clauses or when you razor out those clauses, you have a palette of synonyms and like a painter with those dots of color, you need to test how the whole poem will shift if you change just one word, I can tell right away when writing hasn't been put through these paces, the sentences are stuck in old habits of speech, subject, verb, object, subject, verb object. And yet they don't have any of the vigor of spoken sentence sounds. They remain mere notation. But instead of haranguing, I want to give you an example of a poem's, revisions that shows all this verbal dynamism. I'm talking about a poem that is in fact about the very attempt to move between subjective and objective reality. I sent a handout out around and I know there weren't enough, but if you have it, maybe you can look on with someone.

Speaker 4 (00:34:08):

If not, I'm going to read the poems. Anyway, these are two versions of William Carlos Williams poem, flowers by the Sea. The first version is from 1930 and then he republished it five years later to line shorter in 1935 in his book Adam and Eve in the City, here's the first version, flowers by the sea over the flowery sharp pasture's edge unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form. Flowers by the sea bring each to each change. Chicory and daisies tide yet released seem no longer flowers alone, but color and the movement or the shapes of quietness, whereas the thought of the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plant-like stem.

Speaker 4 (00:35:03):

And here's the second version, flowers by the sea. When over the flowery sharp pasture's edge unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form, chicory and daisies tide released seam, hardly flowers alone, but color and the movement or the shape perhaps of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plant-like stem. There's no supreme court ruling on one versus the other. But I think it's pretty objectively clear that the revision is a huge improvement. One thing that happens is that the syntax is made dynamic. In that first version, you have these opposite independent clauses over the flowery sharp pasture's edge on scene. The salt ocean lifts its form flowers by the sea bring. It's as if he needs to set up a certain level of information to then show you what's going on in this background. Whereas in the second version, that's part of a coordinate clause of causation and dependence. And those become sinuously related in a kind of flow of energy and ENT flow. That to me at least seems to reflect and embody that swaying of the ocean end of the pasture. And this weird contradiction in which it's the pasture that seems wild and frightening and the ocean that seems tame and pastoral.

Speaker 4 (00:36:44):

He also cuts out some of the abstract, slightly ponderous language near the end, the thought of the sea is circled, it's completely gone. Here quietness becomes restlessness, which I think is more precise. Some of the line breaks or the ments seem more dynamic to me, putting edge on the beginning of the line, moving sways as well to the end. But all these, and here comes a suggestion, all these formal elements, and John and Keisha mentioned some too. Parts of speech and where they are on the line, what your syntax is doing, what the poem sounds like, where rhyme works, the variation of sentence length, a tone of voice, what kind of claim a speaker is making in a certain place or advancing, what kind of argument, sound tone, line, phrase, syntax. All these formal elements that we revised for in specific places are microcosms. I think of the largest most important element, which is the action of the poem, what it's doing.

Speaker 4 (00:37:58):

And my response, my way of dealing with that about problem in a poetry class is usually to replace it with not what the poem is about, but what is the poem doing? And I try to ask myself that in a revision, what is it doing? Because these small decisions that we make, are there too many modifiers? Is the abstraction unclear? Do we know where we are? Is the sentence variation dynamic? Is that sentence too long or too short? Is the rhythm cluttered? Is the meter clear? Is the meter too ic and plotting? All these sort of rules of thumb we work with are just that they're rules of thumb. And we can come up with any number of instances in which our rule of thumb is wrong. So what are we given? We're given the action of the poem and our trust as to what that will be become.

Speaker 4 (00:38:53):

The music or painting or poem becomes this thing outside the self, the self itself becomes a stranger. Dog language, which attempts to embody the beauty of an oceanside. Pasture embodies the pasture and yet remains a part. I suspect that in our own day-to-day work as writers, we experience such encounters. We draft a poem in the evening in a burst of what feels like a breakthrough of inspiration. The next morning when the dopamine is worn off, we look at the poem and it reads as if some blinkered dope wrote it. I think there's always a chance that such bewilderment though can become wonder when we see our work as an actual thing, even if sometimes a slightly abject thing, we arrive at a beginning. There's a brilliant passage about this very process in Ben Johnson's elegy for Shakespeare. There's a passage where he claims that Shakespeare is a tremendously gifted, miraculous writer.

Speaker 4 (00:39:55):

And then he stops and says It wasn't just nature and here's that passage, yet I must not give nature all thy art. My gentle Shakespeare must enjoy the part for though the poets matter nature be his art, death, give the fashion, and that he who cast to write a living line must sweat such as thine are and strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil, turn the same and himself with it that he thinks to frame or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn for a good poet's maid as well as born that revivified second heat on the muses anvil. That immediate molten life that comes during revision of work and during the revision of revision is at the heart of poetic making, seeing our work as living lines, as actual things that we forge with ourselves outside of ourselves. We start to see what necessary action can be. And despite the solitary nature of writing and reading this action, it's something which I'm convinced we can and will help each other with. And I wish it for you. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:41:31):

Hi everybody. Let me echo Peter and thanking John for putting this together. This is great. And I love Ben Johnson. So when John asked us to think about this panel, he charged us with coming up with three favorite starting points for revision A. And I think we had to do it immediately right on the spot. And so what I came up with is just absolute bullshit,

Speaker 5 (00:42:02):

But it got me started. So what I sent him, or what I emailed him was my starting points for revision would be illiterate because we're poets and that they would focus on personality, place and presence. And this just seemed brilliant at the time. Alright, so what I realized I was talking about was the notion of the scene, and there's several of my students and former students here, and they can leave because they've heard me talk about this before. But over the years, this has become increasingly important to me. The notion of the scene and personality, place and presence are really just another way of talking about the elements of the scene. So I'm going to explain all this, and this is a fairly, I dunno if it's nuts and bolts, but it's a pretty straightforward way of thinking about revision. If you're not interested in meaning, this won't be very useful to you.

Speaker 5 (00:42:54):

And I don't mean that in dismissive way, I'm just trying to identify my audience right up front. So for the sake of argument over the years, I've come up with this notion that the scene can be thought of as a unit of composition. In other words, instead of starting or furthering a poem with an image or some kind of sonic device, we can think instead of how to deliver information and feeling via scenes. So scenes do their work through interaction scenes are not static vessels of setting. In fact, setting is just one element of a scene and it's not necessarily even the most important one. So we can think of how to deliver information, how to deliver feelings via these elements of scene by noticing that they're there for one thing, because poets don't usually use these terms. These are not the standard stock elements of poetry.

Speaker 5 (00:43:45):

Now not all poems are scenic, but surprisingly many are. So that means that they communicate their meanings in ways that are very similar to those used by prose writers. I think John Wrightly talked about how important it is to take that step back at some point and say, how is this not prose? But it's sometimes really useful to think about our poems in terms of how they're like prose, how they're doing, many of the things that prose writers do. So it strikes me that prose writers probably compose at the level of the sentence and that most poets probably compose at the level of the phrase, but that all of us probably often create meaning at the level of the scene. So let me first talk about the obvious, which is sometimes always that obvious. What is a scene? Well, first of all, a scene is a self-contained unit, and poems generally are self-contained units.

Speaker 5 (00:44:41):

So it makes sense to talk about them together. Though it may not have a self-contained plot, A scene generally has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most stories, certainly most novels, and many, many memoirs are really just daisy chains of scenes. They don't necessarily move linearly through time and space, but they accrete, they slowly or quickly accumulate into an overall hole. A series of very small stories collects into a larger one. Now, in a poem, the overall story may never be told explicitly, but a single scene is often enough to suggest it, or at least that's oftentimes the goal. Now poems can have many scenes, but it's easy to think in terms of this conversation, to think in terms of a single scene. So typically the elements of scene are broken out in the following way. All scenes have setting, all scenes have characters or character. All scenes have dialogue or monologue, and all scenes have action. So let me move through these. If this is pedantic, well welcome to my world.

Speaker 5 (00:45:51):

I am a professor, I must profess, alright, setting, setting includes descriptive details, a sense of time, daily time, historical time, minutes, hours, seasons, years, you name it. And atmosphere, light and mood. Okay? So all of that is included in setting. Character means simply that someone is present in the moment that is being represented in a lyric poem that someone is often simply the speaker. Dialogue is dialogue, but it's also often implied particularly in poems or summarized or represented via internal narration action. Except in highly plotted fiction is usually more interaction characters interact with each other or with their environments and with the setting. And this to me is crucial, or at least it is generally. There has to be interaction in a piece of literature and focusing on its presence or absence in the context of a scene can be a helpful way to think about revision. Characters need to interact with the elements of the scene. And by character, again, I'm sometimes just talking about the speaker. So going back to my original three starting points, I don't want to cheat. Personality is established primarily by voice, but not only by voice, but it is crucially but expression of character in a poem. So to me, personality is the expression of character in a poem. So just like fiction, we are dealing with characters. It's an interpretation. Personality is of the voice and the narrator.

Speaker 5 (00:47:33):

How are you using your narrator? How is the speaker of your poem being understood? These need to be questions we ask when we step back from that draft and think about what is and isn't working. It's a very basic, very fundamental question. Those questions rather, and it's often one that you have to remind yourself to ask who's talking? What do they sound like? How are they being understood? Place is obviously there of the poem, the physical setting. There's nothing mysterious there. Presence is the larger here and now of the poem, the atmosphere and the nonverbal tone. And critically it's the relationship of the voice to the setting or the action of the poem presence. I put last because it's the most important. If it's not there, the other two don't matter. The poem has to have presence.

Speaker 5 (00:48:32):

If at the revision stage we can examine our poems in light of these distinctions or categories, we can often see very quickly what's missing or what's too present. Because scenes, if they're anything are balanced, they need the right proportions of personality, place and presence of setting character, dialogue, and action. Now, I want to give us time, you time to ask questions at the end of this to all of us. So instead of, I was going to talk about a couple of poems in more detail, but instead I'll talk about these poets generally, and you can go find the poems and they're poets you all know. So if we were to take Frank O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop, everybody in this room knows who those poets are, two of the most influential poets of the last 100 years, hands down. And we were to just think about them in terms of how they deploy scenes.

Speaker 5 (00:49:23):

We could learn an enormous amount in very different ways. When we think of O'Hara, we think primarily of voice. Here is one of the most charismatic voices to ever exist in language on the page. In fact, as a collector of detail and minutiae and quotidian stuff, his poems are filled with things that would fly off the page if it wasn't for that incredible voice that we hear so clearly and which creates such a verifiable personality and language, we often forget some of the other elements of the scene because that voice is so powerful. The exact opposite is true in bishop. The voice is turned down, the volume on the narrator is less loud, it's not as flashy, and yet it's crucial without that subdued narrator and interacting with the scenes that are being described. And of course most of bishop's poems are about the activity of description.

Speaker 5 (00:50:14):

On some level, we don't have tension. We have flat still eyes, we have flat character descriptions. So her voice is just as crucial, just not as flashy. What I would invite you to do is to go into those two poets and look at their poems in terms of these other elements. With O'Hara, this is particularly interesting because he so effectively disguises them, camouflages them. And yet no O'Hara poem does not exist in a here and now. And because he's able to locate you so effectively somewhere at the beginning of a poem, he can go anywhere. And this is one of the great freedoms of his poems and why there's such astonishing time traveling poems, is that they are so subtly and effectively located. So we always know that we're in a place, even if we don't necessarily know specifically where that place is. And with Bishop, of course it's all named right up front, but then it becomes something else.

Speaker 5 (00:51:10):

How does she establish that presence? I talked about how is tone so effectively managed in those poems with such a quiet narrator. How does she manage to communicate pathos without, as O'Hara often does, using very flashy punctuation and announcing pathos. Here is where you need to feel this way. O'Hara will tell us. So for me, it is not that one is more effective than the other, but there are two wonderfully different poets in terms of their employing of scenic devices. And if you just focus on the elements of the scene in those two, you'll learn a lot about what isn't in your own poems when you go back to revise. Because for me, when I spend time with my students' poems, a lot of times I'm just asking the very simple questions that these folks have already said. How do we ask the question of where are we in the poem?

Speaker 5 (00:52:00):

What's happening in the poem? What does this person really feel about what's happening in the poem? How are we supposed to know that? Is this person nice? Is this person not nice? Is this person had a good day? Is this person still in love? Not necessarily important questions for every poem, but we need to understand who we're dealing with and we often forget that our readers expect that. Alright, I'm going to cut it short. The poems I was thinking of talking about were Bishop Sina, which is just mind boggling poem for the management of all of these things. And a little known poem of O'Hara is called Vincent. In that poem, if you find it, which is easy to find, just notice how quickly he establishes location and how quickly he's gone. And in a very short poem, how much time and distance and space he travels through without ever losing us. Alright, thank you very much.

Speaker 6 (00:53:04):

Hi everybody. How are you? Good. I want to echo everyone and thank John for inviting me to be part of this. It's pretty cool. And thanks to my other fellow panelists, I'm a little mad at Peter. This was going to be my thing. I've been sitting there really working that out, and you stole that. So now I don't have anything to talk about. He's rev it? Yeah. Yes, I could revise it for him. I do want to start by just offering this disclaimer that once you hear everything that I have to say, that you'll probably think, well, Erica needs to get out more and not be so obsessive and such a control freak, but try to stick with me through these three strategies. I honestly didn't remember that John asked us to write, so I have no idea what I told you, but I'm sure it was idiotic.

Speaker 6 (00:53:52):

So we'll just start with this. Instead, I'm going to talk about this in terms of the way that I approach it with my own work, not necessarily the way I approach it with my students. Those are two different animals for me. But when I'm thinking about revising, I am thinking about something slightly different than what I tell my students. Revising for me is not editing. Editing is taking out a semi and using an M dash instead or taking out T H e R e and turning it into the correct t h e I R, which is a huge problem of mine. And I also don't think of revision as a kind of polishing. I don't think about making it shiny and pretty. That seems sort of like an untangible thing that I don't really know how to do. So when I think about revising, I think about the word vision.

Speaker 6 (00:54:40):

Vision in terms of the faculty of sight and also the idea of vision as a kind of apparition. So for me, then revision involves taking a look at what I've done, what it is that I've seen and turned into a poem, and then what I can do with that to turn that into something else. So in that wave revision for me is a kind of experiment, sort of a, what would happen if I did this? What if I did this instead of that? What's there? What could be there? So revision then involves a kind of shift, not necessarily in the purpose of the poem, but in the execution of that purpose. The manner in which I choose to get to the crux of what I'm trying to say as I'm trying to uncover what it is that I really want to say, whether I said it, and most importantly why I feel saying it is of such a necessity that I think other people need to hear it, that it wakes me up at 3:00 AM and says, Erica, don't wake up the dog, but Jesus Christ, get some shit done.

Speaker 6 (00:55:41):

I like to think of this quote from Emerson when I'm revising. He wrote, oh, keep me perpetual muse ears roaring with many things. And for me, those many things involves questioning my choices. Coming to a situation where you can have those objective stances, as Peter was talking about, for me, it's pushing myself out of the first drafts comfort zone. Writing a poem, of course is not writing an essay of any kind, but I often like to ask myself the questions that I poses to my undergraduate composition students, those basic journalism questions of who, what, when, where, how, and why. So the way I approach revision means reconsidering the how and the why, forcing myself into understanding why I wrote it, uncovering that initial motivation. So for me, I don't like to call myself a formalist. That seems weird, but I do write mostly in traditional forms.

Speaker 6 (00:56:41):

Metrical almost always rhyming poetry. So for this kind of experimentation that I like to do, it can be a little difficult. Obviously, if you don't like the N word in a Cessna and you want to change it, that means you have to change at least seven lines. If you decide in your sonnet that you want to break line four on a noun and instead of a verb, you have to essentially change everything that came before or after it. So this is where the control freak part starts to come into it. Just again, work with me here. So when I try to think of revising my formal poems, I have two basic strategies, and I've sort of built this on the idea of a remix of a song. You have the original version, I'm not talking about a cover, but you have the version and then there's like the DJ remix.

Speaker 6 (00:57:26):

Yeah, a few of you. And for me, I listen to, for better or worse, a lot of hip hop music. And there are essentially two ways that they remix a song. And the first way is by changing the beat. And the second way is by bringing in additional voices. So for me, revision strategy number one, change the beat for me. I like to think about it again, in terms of musical theory kinds of terms. You've got the upbeat and that's when you're stressing the one and the three in the four, four times like 1, 2, 3, 4. And then you have the backbeat like 1, 2, 3, 4, I won't dance anymore. That's it. So I try to go back and forth between this idea of the upbeat and the backbeat. So I almost always start writing in Iam Bic pentameter. So what I would do then with the revision is switch it up and try to go.

Speaker 6 (00:58:16):

So just pretend for a minute that I'm Robert Frost. I'll give you a second to think about it. And here we go. Okay, so this is my poem. This is Birch's. Let's just pretend this is the first draft. When I see Birch's bend to left and right across the lines of straighter, darker trees, I like to think some boys have been swinging them, right? It's the way that it starts. So that is the upbeat version. Now, the backbeat version, watching bending Birches left and right and crossing straighter, darker swinging bending for me, the first version in the blank verse reinforces that natural quality of speech. And that lends itself to the kind of narrative that the poem is engaged in. This reminiscence of childhood versus adulthood and the linear quality, I think of the blank verse. And that sort of natural speech sound lends itself to that sort of narrative.

Speaker 6 (00:59:14):

The second version when I went Trochaic sounds a lot sort of more whimsical and wistful with that lilting of the trophies going back and forth and back and forth. And to me, as I took too much time and continued doing that to the rest of the poem, I realized that then all of a sudden the speaker started to sound slightly unreliable. He was just sort of swept up in the breeze and not really sure about what it was that he was saying. So switching the meter for me entirely switched the poem. And that's something that I just like to try doing because it's not that what I did first was right, or what I did second was wrong. Again, for me, it's about tr


No Comments