This week we are very lucky to have an article about revision by poet Susan Rich, described by Naomi Shihab Nye on the back cover of her first prize-winning collection The Cartographer’sTongue as “a caring citizen of every heart-land.” Not only that, she is a brave and dedicated teacher: her article is filled with examples from her own revision process, the back-room part of writing that few poets allow a general audience to see. Where Susan talks about her drafting process, you will find links to special web pages that display her drafts, handwritten notes in the margins and all. These may take awhile to download, so our suggestion is this: read the article all the way through and on second reading click to see the drafts Susan discusses. If you print out a copy of the article or of the web pages with the drafts and handwritten comments, you’ll be able to use Susan’s discussion well.

It’s Not How You Write, It’s How You Re-Write
by Susan Rich

“Art and virtue are measured in tiny grains. Only when revisions are precise may the building stand square and plumb,” wrote the Chinese poet, Lu Chi seventeen hundred years ago. Some things never change, it seems. Revision is still at the heart of poetic practice. At least for this poet. I tell my students if it weren’t for learning the fine art of revision, I would never have become a published poet. I suspect this is true for most writers. But does what one writer learn about revision have any bearing on what works for another?

Last week at a conference in Vancouver a woman approached me. She explained that she’d attended a workshop that I gave on revision three years ago in Los Angeles and that she still kept the handouts and notes from the class to refer to when she’s writing. It struck me as odd that showing her and the other participants the messy, muddled, often embarrassing worksheets for my own poetry could be useful in their own poetic practice. However, here was a former student telling me it was so. This chance meeting in Vancouver convinced me that there’s something useful to be gleaned by looking deeply into another writer’s practice, even if it is only the pleasure of literary voyeurism.

First some confessions. I am a slow writer. It is not unusual for a poem to take me at least a year to get right. Many pieces lie in old computer files for a decade until I figure out what to do with them. And when I am working on a poem my methods can be unconventional. For example, I like to take my poems for walks. Perhaps I’ll spend the morning working on a piece and after a few hours get to the point where I’ve changed the word remodel back to reclamation four or five times. That’s when I know it’s time for a change of scene. I grab my clipboard, the poem, a pen, and throw on a warm jacket.

As I walk something relaxes in my body, the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other in quick succession gives me something other than words to focus on. I’m freed from the judging eye of my computer screen; the day seems full of possibilities. I feel foolishly happy. I am a writer in the world. I think of myself as following the fine tradition of Wallace Stevens who, it was rumored, wrote all his poems in his head as he walked an hour each morning to his office where he sold insurance.

So where does the revision come in? As I roam my neighborhood, clipboard in hand, I glance down at the black squiggles on the page. I read them aloud to the seagulls and pretend I’m learning lines for a play. I’m an actress or maybe a singer. And here’s the secret: I lull myself into believing that the poem on the clipboard was written by someone else. Now I can see those same words I struggled with for hours with fresh, playful eyes. I can see more clearly what is working and what needs to disappear. The image I’ve been looking for might appear as I see cyclists, dogs, and silver scooters flying by. An old man smiles at me and I realize the ending that’s eluded me is in the color of his worn sports coat.

In any case, the trick is to figure out how you can work on your poem until it, figuratively speaking, sings. The French poet, Paul Valery, claimed poems are never finished, only abandoned, but I don’t think that’s true. A poem is born, moves into adolescence, and eventually reaches the prime of its life. The skill of the writer is to recognize that stage of life and to let the poem be before it transitions into the twilight of old age.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to show you a poem of mine from inception to publication. This poem, now called “Reclamation”, began as an exercise that I gave my students during a one-night workshop at Highline Community College in Des Moines, WA as part of the Jumpstart Series. The prompt was simple: write about a place, past or present, you consider as your home. We closed our eyes and imagined that mysterious place where we felt most comfortable in the world. I told them to remember a best friend’s kitchen or the cottage they visited one August years ago, whatever came to mind. However, when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the dark hole that the carpenter had just created in my living room. This was my first year living in the first house that was all mine. At the time of the workshop I was immersed in a remodeling job: one ugly pair of cabinets taken out and replaced by a small built-in bookcase.

Draft #1, I wrote the lines of “Poetic Remodeling,” down in ten minutes. Here it is typed so you can read it:

Poetic Remodeling

I’ve never had it before–
a place to rip up floorboards
and cabinets, strip down
the interior wall all the way down
to the downstairs stairwell.
How naked it seems–exposed beams
and dark cool air escaping
years of being hidden and hurt.

Tomorrow the carpenter comes back
with walnut and fir, he’ll create a frame inlay
the five tiered bookcase into this empty space,
this theater that’s been masked and unmasked,
this space that’s ever changing–ever moving
forward to its next demolition and desire.

What struck me at the time and made me star this “start” as something to come back to was that I liked both the opening and closing lines. I had my poetry bookends even if the hardbound volumes themselves had yet to appear. The first line I’ve never had it before a place to rip up floorboards, seemed emblematic to me of more than just installing a new bookcase. And the last line, this space that’s ever-changing, ever-moving forward to its next demolition and desire, also hinted at something about home and place that I had yet to figure out. The fact that my own poem seemed mysterious to me seemed an excellent starting point.

By draft #3 “Remodel” had found its form and I had my line length of seven to eight syllables, further refined into couplets. There is a note to myself on the worksheet to “figure out what I’m doing.” About halfway down the page is a line about years of silence and hurt hiding in that empty space is circled. I recognize it as a place-marker for some emotional state. The language is abstract, weak, but what hides behind it is important to discover. As always, my mind wanders while I write and there is another note to myself “more food poems? Strawberry?” at the bottom of the page. [see Draft #3]

Finally by draft #9 the poem, “Reclamation” is beginning to emerge. What is it we’re seeking? Is the hinge that opens the poem for me. I’ve allowed myself the freedom within the poem to figure out what it is I’m writing about, to enlarge the poem from something about a specific construction project (green carpet, mouse leavings) and to risk sentimentality with a move into gardening, fires, flood – / aren’t we put on this earth to love? What compels me toward, or holds me back from, creating this illusive place we crave? Home. It seems natural at this point to return to childhood and the home my parents had or didn’t have, how their fears kept them from buying the house they dreamed of. [see Draft #9]

It’s draft #9 that teaches me the most. The worksheet shows my notes about syllable count, word choice (a memory vault or a memory in molecules? fear of frozen pipes or financial risk?) and everything except the middle of the poem is pretty much fixed. I can look back on this paper and see that the form and the content are emerging together. As Robert Creeley said in an interview a year before his recent death, “Content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content. They sort of go together is the absolute point. It’s really hard to think of one without the other; in fact, I don’t think it’s possible.”

By the time “Reclamation” is finished, draft #36, the poem seems complete. How can I tell? Because there feels effortlessness to its movement, because the couplets on the page look good together, because I can read the poem aloud from start to finish without hesitation or correction. One of the reasons I choose to write in couplets is that they keep me honest. The weak lines have nowhere to hide. All that white space around the words calls attention to every consonant and vowel on the page.

Reclamation

I’ve never had it before–
a place to rip up the floorboards,

disappear the interior wall
through to the stairwell below.

How naked the house seems–
exposed beams and dark cool air–

cracked, vulnerable, and, still
breathing. Irresistible

this allure, to look behind-
the-scenes to phlegm green

carpet and mouse leavings.
What is it that I’m seeking

behind this ex-closet door?
A memory vault of what

my parent’s might have built
if not for fear of bursting

pipes, falling trees, their children?
Each year the litany began:

gardening, fires, flood–
aren’t we put on this earth to love?

Tomorrow, my carpenter
will come bringing with him

bird’s eye maple and golden fir.
He’ll create a frame, build in

a bookcase for this empty space,
this theater that’s been dressed

and redressed for some fifty years.
This home moving forward–

along with the inhabitants–
to its next demolition or desire.

When “Reclamation” found its home in the Seattle Review, the editor chose it for a themed issue on the nature of, what else, home. And even though the poem went through 30+ drafts, it now looks to me like the poem that was meant to be. Begun in the deep of winter and completed seven months later in late August, the poem emerged as I studied every draft. I wanted to see what I could learn about revision by paying close attention to my process.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal that summer:

“Know that everything you’ve written begins with one word haltingly followed by another ~ a profoundly pathetic lack of rhythm. Often, not even one image stays intact. And you call yourself a writer? ~ But let it live there awhile, even a couple of years, if that’s what’s needed, and the dusty fragment of an idea will take shape, the ineffable ring ~ What made you willing to scribble down the code with no way to decipher it, until something else comes along.”

Perhaps that woman in Vancouver just wanted to know that no one gets it right the first time. Perhaps she needed permission to dust her house as she revised, as Marianne Moore used to do or to work on a poem for sixteen years as Elizabeth Bishop did with “The Moose.” I could write another essay tomorrow on the revision process I followed for another poem and it would certainly look very different than the process for “Reclamation.” The point is this: revision is the difference between the adequate poem and the excellent one. It is the magic of a word positioned just right in a harmonious line of sound, it is the title changed and re-changed again. It is believing in your own poem. Get to work.