The recent Writing It Real contest provided the opportunity for people to write about the world around them, send in a draft, receive my responses for help in revising, and then re-enter a revision for our final judge, Betsy Howell.

In selecting Diane Drury’s poem “Expect It in the Casino,” Betsy wrote:

Not all memoir need be serious.  I liked this poem for its playfulness and the way the author used letters to draw her words on the page.  Though the setting is the contrived environment of a casino, the personalities described are a nice medley of those we find every day in our regular lives.

What started from a prompt about the world around us, resulted in a poem that effectively describes people in a casino so well that readers track the letters and words down the page and seem to experience the motions and sounds the people in the poem are reacting to.
This week, we are delighted to publish Diane’s poem this week:

Expect It in the Casino
By Diane C. Drury

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It’s delightful to read down the page and recognize types of people and their behavior. It is delightful as well to experience the poet’s ability to use type on a page to evoke not only the behaviors she is describing but to seem to evoke the what the people in the poem are reacting to. This poem offers us a kinesthetic experience. The feeling of being in a casino is recreated in the experience of reading the words.

In the first version of the poem that she submitted, Diane called the poem “The Machines.” I read a long way down the poem thinking that the names she put in were names of machines and then thinking that the poet means we were all just programmed as a machine can be.

The house wins phrase certainly made this reader think, oh, yes, we are all sufferers and we all get to the finish line of death no matter our style.

I felt that the title gave away the luster of the line “House wins,” even if I didn’t realize this was all happening in a casino. The word “machines” made me think people are merely programmed.

So, I suggested to Diane that a title with a location or reason for what she’d described in the poem would help keep the reader’s feet on the ground of her poem.  It is remarkable what a difference the new title makes in appreciating the subject of the poem and going along for the ride it provides.

Diane adds this about writing her poem:

I often visit the casinos to people watch.  It is rich with activity and life.  I used those ideas to create, at first, a simple poem with a few stanzas.  During my experience with the Southern Arizona Writing Project, my writing group provided suggestions with the wording of the last two lines.  They suggested that it might make for a nice shape poem in that the imagery I was trying to create could be brought out.  I worked with that idea and thought of ways to be playful with the appearance of the language.  I created the shapes for each persona within the poem as I remembered them in their mannerisms or discourse.  My writing group thought the poem was very much improved with the revisions; so did I.  We were thoroughly familiar with the content and the intended meaning of my words after days of discussion and massaging of the words.

As I shared the poem with people outside of my writing group, some of the interpretations were not close to what the poem meant to me. Neither did they understand the message I was trying to deliver. In fact, their interpretations were often very far off.  I began to recall this was the case with my writing group when I first read it aloud for them.  The original title was “The Machines.”  I wanted to keep the title as it was, and I had many internal arguments with myself before I began to even entertain the idea to give it up.  More feedback from writers, especially Sheila’s feedback, prompted me to change the title to “Expect It In The Casino.”   I have shared the poem as it is now with students, colleagues, and friends.  Since changing the title, I find I do not have the conversation that requires me to explain the content.  Rather the conversation is how I have crafted the poem.

Writing about the process of the crafting of this essay, I am reminded of the words of William Zinsser in his essay “Simplicity” in his book On Writing Well. He states:

Writers must therefore constantly ask:  what am I trying to say?  Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?  If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery.

A simple change of title was all it took for me to clear the fuzz in my machinery.

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There’s that lesson again–sometimes the questions readers have result from a misstep the writer took that sets the reader up for misunderstanding. In this case, although calling the poem “The Machines” might be a kind of colloquial name for the casino, her readers did  not always do from this title what she expected them to do in their understanding. Being precise about the location helped readers know where they were and they could relax into the poem without distractions.