Self-Inflicted Wounds - Revising Poetry, Part I

You’ve got a notebook (computer) full of finished poems and wonder "What comes next?". Do you slap the verse in an envelope and rush off to the post office to submit them far and wide? Or do you carefully revise your work, and create the strongest poems possible?

I lean toward revision, more so now that I know the depth of my not knowing. It’s a rare poem that can make the leap from thought to publication without an important stop in between. Poems benefit from being changed, rearranged, and recreated. Almost every poem can be tightened. We can make a poem better, stronger, faster. But remember to save your first draft, because sometimes an overzealous poet can revise the life right out of a poem. It’s a fine line, and the more you practice tightening your words, the easier it is to know where the boundary between ‘mostly finished’, and ‘dead horse’ lie.

Most poems DO benefit immensely from a cooling off, or waiting period. This can be as little as a day, or as long as years. I still have poem pieces I wrote in 1983, patiently waiting for the right moment to step into the spotlight. Poetry is a lot like cooking – some poems need a quick stir-fry, others benefit from a long simmer, preferably in wine.

Revision is more in-depth than rearranging line and stanza breaks, or consulting a thesaurus for word replacement. Revision means you have to be cruel sometimes - ax a favorite line, ar brilliant image that just doesn’t work with THIS poem. Hence the cooling off period. You need to examine your poem with a critical eye, a thing that’s difficult to do when you are still enthralled with your words. Put the poem in a hermetically sealed box until its pitiful cries for love fade away.

Work from the assumption that what you really meant to say in the poem is contained somewhere within that first draft. You are an archeologist, intent on coaxing treasure from dirt piles. Revision should cleanse and fine tune your poem until it is close to the trigger that cause you to slam on the brakes, pull to the side of the road, and scribble furiously on a taco stained napkin.

First revision pass through your poem, remove the extraneous. You know what it is. The excessive thens and buts and ands dragging your piece down, distracting from the meat of your work. The words are unnecessary. Get rid of them. Then rework the lines word removal made off kilter. This will be an ongoing job, rewriting to smooth over what you took away. The upside is rewriting can make the poem better. Tighter. Use strong words at the ends of lines. Like a properly made bed, you should be able to bounce a quarter off the surface.

Study your poem. Which lines, images, words are stronger, which convey the emotion you want to carry to the reader? Which attached themselves as carry-on baggage? If your poem is 4 stanzas long, is there a weak stanza, one not pulling its weight? Maybe the poem would benefit from a stanza-ectomy. On the flip side, perhaps you’re shortchanging yourself, and the poem needs more room to breathe, to tell its story. Do you have too many ideas going on? Unless it’s an epic, generation spanning ballad, most poems direct us toward a moment in time, the awareness of an experience, the illustration of a slice of a life.

You’ve completed your first pass through the poem, and survived. Unnecessary words were eliminated, stanzas were examined for flab, ideas were weighted and measured.

Now comes the hard part, walking the tightrope between ‘almost there’, and ‘finished enough’.

PART II: Telling Little Stories

"Anonymous" Photos

This just in. Pictures of the (in)famous "Anonymous" poster to my blog. Delivered by carrier Gnome in the middle of the night with utmost secrecy. Said Gnome promised more as long as the library paste kept flowing. (What can I say, gnomes are easy AND cheap)

First on our hit parade, the 1960's, era of bell bottoms, hippies, and banana seat bikes. "Anonymous" seemed to have missed the memo on the bell bottoms, however. Check out the highwaters on the kid on the left, the one with the slightly apprehensive look, as if he suspects popping wheelies on a banana seat bike will lead to no good. I know we lived a block from the river, but yeesh. And leather slip-ons? At least the Cuz on the right had the good sense to wear Keds, like a normal goomba.

That brings us to the late 1970's.

I know "Anonymous" will claimed he was framed, but I say he did it to himself with those disco Elton glasses. Another victim of involuntary parental photography, "Anonymous" grits his teeth and hunches his rather skinny shoulders in classic family mug shot pose.

Bonus points if "Anonymous" can identify A) the doorways he's standing between, and B) the picture his head so artfully bisects.

The 70's gave way to the late 1980's -- decade of epic disasters and benefit concerts, and apparently ushered in a era (ear?) of

Corn for the Unwashed Masses.

While "Anonymous'" mother stood in line for hours at the mall to secure a Cabbage Patch Kid for "Anonymous'" daughter, "Anonymous" ate corn. While millions watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on tv, so did "Anonymous". While eating corn.

One can only wonder if this fascination with corn outlasted the 80's. I would imagine it to be a lifelong obsession, stemming from an unfortunate covert incident on the Susquehanna River, involving a rubber raft, a cornfield, and an incredibly gullible little sister.

The late 1990's. A renaissance return to the eyewear of the 70's, a Gladiator haircut, and a Freudian beard. What message is "Anonymous" attempting to send?

--The layered look never goes out of style--

--I missed the Grunge generation and I'm playing catch up?

--Quick, bring me another Yuengling if I have to endure more photos!

--Help, my better half has a gun in my back and is forcing me to take this picture?

The world may never know, but one thing is for sure. There's more pictures where these came from, "Anonymous". I'm still waiting on some Stan Rogers CD's.

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Don't make me use the Photoshop.

It could get ugly.

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Brought to you by the Society for the Encouragement of Torturing Big Brothers, Western Chapter.

Poetry Thursday 8/30 - An Open Window

In honor of our last Poetry Thursday,

and "An Open Window" writing prompt.

Cast Away
by Constance Brewer

Wine bottles lined up in military rows.
Each dead soldier prepared for this,
the final mission, a critical sacrifice.
Coiled tight as an old phone cord,
notebook paper stands inside its green
glass prison, ragged edge rolled
face to face with straight blue lines.
No directions to this place, just a handful
of sand and a poem scrawled on each
sun baked page. If this is the end,
the words have their orders. Carry on.
Flung into the salt blue sea, bottles
spin in the current, bob their way
to the horizon, and are gone.

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Cartography For The Directionally Challenged

I love maps.

I took mapping in college and decided I would someday name a dog or horse - but not a kid- "Universal Transverse Mercator Grid". (I'm kinda rethinking that notion. 'Here, Transverse!' or "Here, Mercator!' just doesn't sound quite right....) My goal in the military was to go to Defense Mapping School. Well, I ended up at Ft. Belvoir (before they moved engineering out to Ft. Leonard Wood) but couldn't quite get the engineering tentacles out of me long enough to wrangle a transfer.

Terrain analysis, geodetic survey, photolithography, imagery and geospatial information, what's not to like? I guess I always was a geek at heart. Yes, I have maps of Middle Earth, the Neutral Zone, and the ancient Mediterranean. In my office I have maps of the county, maps of the state, maps of coal mine and methane well locations, BLM maps and ariel survey maps that appeal to both my geek and artistic sides. The only thing I don't have is a map of the surface of Mars. Yet. I will admit to being defeated by a map of Venice, Italy. I never did find my way around there using a map. Something to do with the canals I think. I hate modern maps, they have no personality, no individuality, and no warnings on the edges "Here There Be Monsters" (Highway Patrol)".

I have to confess to owning Pro Fantasy's Campaign Cartographer. (CC) Talk about a steep learning curve. Yikes. I've had it for over a year and I'm still trying to figure out how to manipulate sheets and layers. I have several maps for my fantasy worlds drawn out on paper, I had notions of transfering them over to CC3. We'll see. I have a drafting table, really big sheets of paper and watercolors, so I may just admit to myself I'm not as geeky as I think I am, and draw them out by hand.

But I hate being defeated by something as simple as a highly complex computer program with intricate commands and self drawing fractals. So I'm playing, because I'm not ready to admit defeat and read the stinkin' help file, I'm from the no guts, no glory school of mapping.

So far the score is maps- 4, glory- 0. Here's a map I made in Campaign Cartographer 3. Very basic, but it helps me visualize the area for a short story I'm contemplating. (click for enlargement)

Whether or Not There's Weather

In looking back over one of my WiP fantasy novels, I noticed little mention of the weather. I did okay describing the terrain; probably because I had certain areas of the world in mind I had my characters travel through. I'd been there; I could still picture the countryside. Other places I hadn't been, but looked at pictures of, watched travel videos, read old accounts. But my cavalry captain rides blithely through his fictional world, unaffected by the weather.

That's about to change.

To be fair, the characters live in an area with a temperate climate. Think Greece, Turkey. There are some mountains, seas, changes in elevation. A secondary character comments on the morning chill in one scene. It's not enough. I had to dig back through my memories a ways but I came up with something to throw at my smug captain. Rain. Lots and lots of rain. I remember hiking in torrential downpours in the military. The kind where waterproof clothing only served to make sure you stayed wet AND sweaty. Soggy clothing that added weight to the load you carried. Helmets that dripped water down the back of your neck and into your eyes. Trying to hold onto a weapon that took on all the characteristics of a fresh caught eel. Boots that got wet inside no matter what you did. Then there was the mud.

I never rode a horse through the type of mud I conjured up for my characters, but I remember trying to walk through it. The annoying squelching sound, the slip-slide muscle-tensing way of walking. The spots where the mud seemed determine to pull the boots right off your feet. The way it flicked up and stuck to everything. I can imagine riding a horse in that muck, and pretty soon discovering all your soldiers were caked with mud splatters until they were nigh unrecognizable.

The one good thing I took away from those lovely forced marches was the fact that it ended. Sooner or later, you reached the conclusion of the march, the training exercise was over, the mission was accomplished – something happened to put an end to your own little bubble of misery. Rain didn't last forever, the operation didn't either. Eventually, there was base camp, or barracks, or some chance to rest, dry off, eat hot food and reset your internal fortitudemeter. Good officers and NCOs made sure the troops were taken care of. They knew how far they could push before rebellion reared its head. They doled out attainable goals and stuck to them. 'Just seven more kilometers and we can stop for the night', 'Once we cross that stream, we'll take a break.' This is the talent of my main character; he can motivate his troops because he is riding alongside them, just as miserable as they are.

I'm looking for a place to put unrelenting, blazing heat into the book. Las Vegas was a bit of a revelation. I'd never been that far southwest. It was hot. 114 degrees and nobody even commented. They just shrugged and went from air conditioned hotel to air conditioned car to other air conditioned places. But what would it be like for my characters to live and work in that kind of environment? Even at night, it didn't cool off all that much. But it would be enough. Troops would have to be moved during the night. Water would have to be located far in advance of movement. Even with sunglasses the view was brutal. All details to consider. I have no characters moving through the desert part of my world in this book. Lucky for them. But I'll remember how the desert was, how Red Rocks looked and felt, all the important details. In the other WiP, the characters go from a climate much like southern India to one that is much colder. One character sees snow for the first time ever. That's hard for me to write about, since I grew up with four seasons.

It's so much easier to have every day a temperate one in novels. That's how the first WiP book started out. Perhaps its just some sort of twisted revenge on my part for all the 'fun' I endured in the military, but if I had to train to be miserable, so do my characters. I didn't have to like it, and neither do they.

I'm sure they're going to tell me all about it. Fine. Bring it on, I got an earthquake in my back pocket and I'm dying to use it. I haven't written anything for a week. My characters will rue the day they let me take a vacation, because I had hours and hours to plot my torture of them in loving detail. It's good to be the god of someone else's world.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas-Part XII, or Egregious Pilfering 201

Poetry Exercise

I like to read other poets, but not all other poets. When I'm in need of inspiration, I go to the public library and leaf through the poetry section books. Margaret Atwood, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Naomi Nye all provide the fodder I'm interested in this week. I bring them home, open up a book at random, and steal.

Hey, don’t look at me like that. It's not what you think. I read a poem, think on the keywords or the major theme, then use that as a jumping off point for my own poem. My self assignment is to do this with every poem in a book. (Good thing poetry books are usually short) It's a creativity booster when used properly. I force myself to think on the poet's underlying message, on how the poem makes me feel, what words were used for effect and why, and even the title – does it reflect what I read in the poem?

Margaret Atwood has a wonderful poem called, "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing". I immediately wanted to read more. How could I not with a title like that? It's a poem about how women view the men who look at them with lust and disgust at the same time. Louise Gluck has a poem with the deceptively simple title "Saints". The opening lines gave me a great deal of inspiration for other poems.

Saints

In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

The wheels immediately started turning, and dissecting. Why were these women saints? Why were their lives different? Isn't that true of any mother-daughter combination? Why did her family have saints? Were there any in my family?

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that's why she escaped suffering.
My aunt's escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

From this I get that the way to escape the pain of life is to be cautious and conservative, to keep a closed heart so it doesn't get hurt, because if you are like the aunt, it's all out there on the table, in plain view. The aunt suffers for her openness. When you love without restraint, you get hurt. Gluck makes no judgment at this point, just compares the two women and their ways of suffering. Gluck goes on to complete the poem by speaking of the aunt.

Still she won't experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence.

We can no more change our nature than make the sea stop hammering the shore. It is what it is. A very Buddhist reflection. Acceptance of the way the world exists at this point in time. It brings the poem full circle, because you reflect on the title, Saints. The two women were very different in their approach to living, but each reached the same point at the end. You can be lauded for cautious conservatism or lauded for an open heart, but changing your very nature isn't possible, logical, or desirable. You end up in the same spot.

The poem inspires me to think on the cyclical nature of things, on acceptance, and on family. I chose to write about family, a reoccurring theme. Sometimes little revelations carry far more weight than I believed possible. So thanks, Louise, Margaret, Naomi, Jorie and especially Billy.

"the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry…"
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"But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask…"

from The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins.