Recently, I was going through a box of saved drafts from decades ago. I had forgotten about the box and the poems inside. But the pandemic-induced itch to go through papers and clean up my studio had me in its grip. And I am glad that was so!

Below is one of the writings I found among pages I had written at the Desert Museum in Tucson in the early 2000’s. I was writing along with my students after we had taken notes during presentations by volunteer docents about the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert.

Reading what I had written, I could tell I had made an attempt to compress my notes about female hummingbirds into something that hopefully sounded poetic and could become a poem. But then when I left the desert for home and a busy life, I seem to have forgotten what had compelled me to compress the notes in hopes of a poem.

Here are the compressed notes:

Female Hummingbirds

They are really very similar, female hummingbirds. Oh, the rufous female has a little russet on her chest, but it is very faint. We are talking grays and greens until we meet the males, some black-chinned, some black handlebar mustached, some brilliant purple at the back of their heads, some golden.

Perhaps when we talk about the males, we are talking about splendor but when we talk of the females we talk about work. Each mother must build her own nest and feed her young. Each must find fruit flies and spiders, threads of the spider’s web to hold her nest together. Each knows how to build her house so it can expand. Her babies will be almost as big as she is after only two weeks.

Watch any female build her nest. She’ll tie it to a branch, line it with grasses and the grey hairs of an opened seedpod or some unsuspecting visitor to her garden. She may pluck a strand of wool from a sweater. She will hollow a place for her eggs with her body and tail.

And she will work like this every year between December and May—80 wing beats a second—and also fit in time each day to visit her 1,000 flowers before she perches through the night when cold air brings her rest and welcome stupor.

Now in my 2021 cleaning-things-out mood, when I looked at the writing, free of the sound of the docent’s voice and her quips about the hair and sweaters of visitors to the garden, I felt I might be able to explore a poetic version of the information and find out why this subject had appealed to me. I started by working in three-line stanzas, as I have found that creating a pattern of equally lined stanzas helps me locate words and phrases that are not necessary and slow the poem down and/or distance the reader from the occasion of the poem. I titled this three-line stanza version of the poem “Female, Hummingbird,” the coma somehow, I thought, pointing out my connection to the work-life of the bird:

Female, Hummingbird

The mother must build her nest with threads’
from a spider’s web, tie it to a branch,
line it with grass and the hair of seed pods,

must hollow a place for her eggs
with body and tail and when her young hatch,
find fruit flies to feed them.

All at 80 wing beats a second and still
she visits her 1000 flowers before enjoying
restful stupor in night’s cool air.

The males have brilliant purple or gold
at the back of their heads, some sport black
handlebar mustaches. We talk of their splendor.

But the grey-green female has only a faint russet
“on her chest, works each December to May
80 wing beats a second!

The males have brilliant purple or gold
at the back of their heads, some sport black
handlebar mustaches. We talk of their splendor.

But the grey-green female has only a faint russet
on her chest, works each December to May
80 wing beats a second!

I repeated 80 wing beats a second because I thought it emphasized the capabilities of the female, of all of us women, and what we accomplish. I thought I was happy with this version until I shared it with my writing group: Why is it important that we talk of the males’ splendor? What does the female hummingbird do the rest of the year? Do seedpods have hair—that’s confusing they said. Why am I pointing out that the female has only a little russet on her chest?

All right, I remind myself, one of my favorite poet teachers, Robert Hass, had warned us students: the poem must appeal to both the simple and the sophisticated reader. Obviously, the skilled writers in my writers’ group were pointing out that the basic story I was sharing needed more. Another way of saying this is that you don’t want the sophisticated reader (most readers of poems) to slow down to consider what you are getting at and fill that in for you. For answers to what I might add to the simple story part of my poem, I turned to reading about hummingbirds. After all, it had been a long time since I’d heard the docent at the Desert Museum and I didn’t have all my notes anyway, only the version I had thought would make a poem.

I learned more on various internet sites devoted to describing the lives of hummingbirds and thus new knowledge found its way into my poem. I must say here that, before the internet, another of my teachers, the poet Colleen McElroy, said that when she needed to learn more about a subject she often went to the children’s library because the information would be direct and accessible:

At the Desert Museum in Tucson, I Learn

The female hummingbird builds her nest with threads
from a spider’s web, ensures it can expand since two weeks
after hatching, her young will have grown as big as she is.

She’ll tie what she’s built to a branch, line it with grass
and the down of a seed pod, camouflage it with lichen,
while the male she mated with is out finding
another woman to fertilize. That’s his job.

She works body and tail to hollow a place for her eggs,
and once her babies hatch, to find fruit flies to feed them.
All of this at 80 wing beats a second and still she visits 1000
flowers a day before restful stupor in night’s cool air.

Oh, the males intrigue us with brilliant gold and purple
at the back of their heads, even black handlebar mustaches on some.
We talk of their splendor while the grey-green female, only a splash
of unadorned russet on her chest, births two broods a season
May to December before flying to warmer climes.

There she’ll fatten herself up for the flight back for her next season’s labor,
free for a time of the males who have started their journey
two weeks earlier to stake out their territory and prepare to dance.

Learning more about both sexes of the species helped me answer my groupmates’ questions—they didn’t have those questions after reading this version. The information also helped me deepen what I was saying about the females’ unrecognized contribution to the species workload. Having all three-line stanzas didn’t seem capable of telling this story, though they helped me move from the prose draft to this version of the poem and the opening and closing stanzas seem good to me in three lines.

NOTE: Not all revising is about making a poem smaller. Sometimes it is about developing a poem and it becomes longer. First, though, sometimes, we do make it smaller as we look for the poetic sound of the piece and hover over “how the poem means” (the late poet John Ciardi wrote a book explaining poetry entitled How Does a Poem Mean).

To see more about revising poems, try these sources:

Poetry in Action: 6 Contemporary Poets Share the Process Behind Their Poems, from the NYT, a rare chance to see the actual drafts and what changed.

Poem, Revised edited by Robert Hartwell Fiske, An in-depth look at the writing processes of 54 poems, each by a different modern author, is provided, complete with early drafts, subsequent revised versions, and short essays from the poets themselves revealing how and why they made specific changes, as well as their editing secrets.

5 Ways to Revise Poems in Writer’s Digest Magazine.