In May, I posted an article called “Coaxing Imaginative Awareness,” in which I reviewed Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser.  After reading the review, some Writing It Real subscribers teamed up to work on creating braided verse inspired by the results of these two poets.  One of these teams, Jackie Sedwick, Maria D. Laso and Taylor Collins, copied me on their verses as they evolved.  When their email quieted down after several months, I asked if I could present their work in Writing It Real along with their individual comments on how the process worked for them.

Here is their work, which sounds convincing and true to emotion when read as one piece.  Acting as editor, I took out four consecutive stanzas where the poets seemed to have lost their footing.  I also tinkered with words in two of the stanzas and suggested a title.

Here’s the poem as I edited it followed by the material I worked on and my discussion of why I made changes.

Dappled

The street person cradles his guitar
plucks cello-like on frets
upside down, both our worlds topsy-turvy.

He watches the day’s slaves and prisoners
strangle joy by the neck.

Once we were all new;
old photograph albums, overstuffed chairs,
threadbare each of us
remnants of remembrance.

 When I recall all I have had
and all I have lost,
I howl with my own madness
like the man under the bridge.

I pull the tattered covers
over my head.  Afraid to peer
at the world.
Afraid I might find
who I am?  Or what
I’m not?

The weary traveler roadside rests
lotus positioned in dappled shade
near jettisoned slate shards.
Beginning his journey
or ending?

Infant or ancient,
if we spin in circles,
the road before us

and the road we’ve ridden before
become one,
a strand, a life,
a string on a guitar.

The maze of life continues.
Pause here, rush there.
I see you now;
I close my eyes and disappear.

I will call the bird, stone; the flower, shoe.
Stones fly to the heavens;
the shoes standing still ponder
the fall.

Jumping through hoops
the world thinks it has me.
I sit back and grin,
goddess of sin.

When time jumps backward,
she trips over hopscotch
lines, sticks picked,
jacks, and ball.

The blue
slipping in,
dripping in.
fin-thin, slim.
a glint, a glimmer,
a glance.
a chance to dance
in blue.

The shade drips off the easel, I…
pause. Colors elude me —
too bright, too varied, not mine.
I give in; it paints itself;
I the observer.
I the doer, not the doing.

By including life’s harsh side–the strangled joy of those of us who work like prisoners and slaves, the way we will all become “remnants of remembrance,” the weariness of seeking—and then inserting the joy of being new and the idea of spinning in circles so the road before and the road behind are one, this poem travels toward truth. The verses undo the topsy-turvy-world-upside-down feeling at the opening.  We don’t have to fill the shoes that ponder the fall; we can disappear into becoming one with creation (blue), and let the quotidian world be what jumps through hoops, not us. This illuminates being.

The verses evoke the dappled shade of life each of us recognizes; we are all travelers sitting in such light. Dappled shade made me think of dappled horses and how the shadings of their coats do not interfere with the quality of their being horses.  If we somehow free ourselves from thinking one way is up and the other down, we might find that dappling in life does not alter the nature of life.

To give the poem such a reading, I did the following in the way of editing:

A stanza that read:

The street person cradles his guitar
plucks cello-like on frets
upside down, both our world and music topsy-turvy.

became:

The street person cradles his guitar
plucks cello-like on frets
upside down, both our worlds topsy-turvy.

I felt compressing words in the last line put the reader’s attention on the way seeing the street person and listening to his music connects the speaker with the street person’s perception.

A stanza that read:

Free men watch slaves and prisoners,
strangle joy by the neck.

became:

He watches the day’s slaves and prisoners
strangle joy by the neck.

Adding “day’s” made it clear that the stanza was about the guitarist and how he would see the world.

The first way read for me that slaves and prisoners strangle joy, and it seemed odd to me to announce this—what else might prisoners and slaves do, I start to wonder?  The phrasing makes me think, of course, it’s the free men’s doing that the slaves and prisoners must strangle joy.  All of this thinking takes me out of the moment of the poem.  If the words allow me in more to the moment of the street person, they evoke a condition of being a slave and prisoner that does not make me think the people causing that state of being are also finding fault with the imprisoned.

I deleted the original stanza that came between what are now stanzas two and three:

A new babe is born,
reminding us all
life is good.
Tears of joy wash the earth.

The line “Once we were all new” brought me quickly to the emotional idea of cycles and the picture of being new amidst old photograph albums made me instantly realize time is fleeting.

Once we were all new;
old photograph albums, overstuffed chairs,
threadbare each of us
remnants of remembrance.

Here are the four congruent stanzas that I deleted. They came right after  the lines, “The shoes standing still ponder/the fall.”

All sound is fury, significant of nothing.

Walking on water,
breathing in bubbles
I ascend into the ocean depths
singing a song of mime.

Stepping on rainbows
commonplace as the
lawn sprinkler plays god;
woman, I, goddess of Spigot.

Humor hears me
and laughs
knowing I am
goddess of
naught.

I wasn’t getting anywhere with these stanzas, though I believe they led the poets back to poetry.  Since I could go from feet pondering a fall to jumping, so I let the images connect the stanzas without the interruption of water and bubbles.

Sometimes in revision it is a matter of finding out where the muse we were working with left for a break. I identify these places by letting myself listen to my inside feelings. If I am eager to read on and feel moved, I know that the words are doing something important.  If the words are calling my attention to figuring out things that take the emotions I’m experiencing away, I wonder if they are significant.  Here the reference to Shakespeare and to Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) doesn’t help me stay with the poets’ journey.  In addition, the logistics of the three stanzas above were difficult—walking on water and breathing bubbles seemed not to go together.  Are there bubbles above water, I asked myself?  I wasn’t sure that going to lawn watering helped me ground my emotions in pondering the fall. With the introduction of a goddess, instead of following a conversation about what life really is, I felt that a label was applied, asking me to accept something that the conversation had not explored. I didn’t know what a goddess of naught was and didn’t feel the poem was leading to an evocation of this sort of goddess. I was eager to remain with the voice that was pondering a fall. So when I came to the word jumping my interest was peaked.  Then to find that the world is jumping through hoops, not the speaker, interested me.  This turning of the cliché not only refers back to the world upside down idea of the first stanza, it leads to my reversing my point of view and now I have entered the new world of the poem.

Revision and editing require very careful listening—“Emotion and reason are not two things:/every shift in feeling must be read,” said the ancient Poet Lu Chi. When I read every one of my emotions as I go through a draft, I have to figure out which words are inspired and emotionally logical, which take me deeper and deeper into the feeling tones of the occasion and which don’t.  Often lines that don’t make it into a finished product act as guides to other better lines. Other times, let’s face it, words are more an “Out to Lunch” sign posted by the muse than part of the poem.  Looking into poems in this way makes revising interesting.

It was a great pleasure to consider this poem and to make some edits to further enjoy its emotional center. Whether or not you decide to work on braided conversations, the words of the poem Taylor, Jackie and Maria wrote will help you trust that if you “just write,” there will be something of significance in what you have written.  Then, if you allow for the quiet listening of the heart when you revise, you will find that significance.

Here are the poets’ notes on their process:

Taylor Collins
We set up a few guidelines and then added to our braid in a round robin
fashion.  Maria and Jackie are more experienced writers.  I’m a beginner. I don’t know if one would ever really finish a braid and I hope that we can continue and if others want to join it would be fine also as far as I’m concerned. This exercise could be done by many or just between two friends as in the Harrison/Kooser book that was the model for this exercise.  It’s a fascinating experience and I’m certain that overtime a pattern would develop in which personalities would evolve fully like they did in the conversations at Braided Creek.

By nature I’m a nonfiction and poetry reader. Since the mind supposedly
has about 65,000 thoughts a day, I take notes about anything and everything that passes into my mind.  I guess that’s why I like poetry– it’s the shorthand of the mind.  As the bumper sticker says, “Life is not a spectator sport.” You are not a writer if you don’t write.

Maria D. Laso
I found the lapses of time between each pass to be both frustrating and intriguing, the latter because I was in a totally different place each time it came around. It felt like receiving random, cryptic writing prompts. I feel I “censored” myself, in that I was always aware someone would be reading what I wrote. I never wrote longhand for this exercise, and I think for me it was too easy to just whip something out, purely by the nature of email. If I did it again, I’d like to do it by hand and with maybe with just one other person, so it would feel more like a conversation.

Jackie Sedwick
The experience, for me, was awesome.  I looked forward to each new piece to see what was building, never worried about where it was going.  I would read Taylor’s and Maria’s latest offerings, and then let my mind, heart, or pen respond.  The symmetry that created itself is a wonder.

And then, finally, I received my copy of Braided.  It was on order, and took awhile to show up.  Very interesting.  The words in the book are so incredible!  The word pictures are phenomenal.  What beauty, and pain, and joy.  Wow!

Thanks Taylor and Maria for the opportunity to be a part of this with you. I’m open to
collaboration with both or either of you again.  Any time and I’ll be checking the WIR Community page to see if others want braided poetry conversation partners.

****

I hope these words by Jackie Sedwick, Maria D. Laso and Taylor Collins along with your reading of “Dabbled” help more of you have confidence in images and impulses that arrive.  Although we don’t know which words are Maria’s, we know that however she judges her lines and however she’d like to improve her process, most of her lines worked well.  Since the conversation is braided among three poets, Maria couldn’t have written more than two of the four stanzas in a row that I edited out!

If you want to take others up on joining into a braid or want to let others know you are available for writing in this fashion, please post your name and email on the WIR Community page.