The Revision Process

[arthur_henry]

I was wondering if some of the more experienced posters would mind sharing their revision process for one of their successful poems, something along the lines of what Harry did for Eau de Vie in the Blurbs. Perhaps show the evolution of the poem, and discuss why certain changes were made along the way.

It would be really helpful to me (and hopefully others), because it is one thing to read about the revising process -- how it should be done, what things to look for, etc. -- and another to actually see it done; much as the best way to learn how to write poetry is to read it.

[Saluda]

I strongly second Art's idea. I find revision an even more intriguing process than creation, if that's possible--I love to get a sense of how others proceed, where they start and where they end up, how many drafts a poem typically goes through, whether they continue plowing through one poem or put it away and come back later, and so on. Literary Cavalcade, a magazine aimed at high school English students in the US (I'm not sure if it's still being published) used to have a wonderful section entitled "Work in Progress." In it, a contemporary poet would share an early draft of a poem along with the finished poem (usually published), and in an accompanying narrative describe the process and decisions that went into the revision. I copied every one I could find and still read them from time to time; the poets include Vijay Seshadri, Elizabeth Spires, Kimiko Hahn, Cornelius Eady, and others. I'd love to know where to find more accounts like that, like Harry's for "Eau de Vie." Maybe we can start a PFFA collection of revision memoirs?

[LizzieB]

The revision process for me is a long one. Generally when I'm working on something there are various points at which it will sit for a good month, maybe two. The ones that come easier will sit for a few weeks atleast while I gather my thoughts on ways to improve upon the current version. There are a few that are in between for a year or more. I have one poem that's been sitting for three years, I'm still working at it. Every time I reread it I just discover I need more time to think about it. I really dont see any of my poems as being finished, there are always ways to improve upon what is written. After considering how to create a transitional line for an ending, more ideas flood into my mind. I'll brainstorm for a while before actually coming back and working out on paper (or screen) how all my ideas will link together. For me there really isnt a rush to finish a poem. I used to be the type to constantly go back and search for hours, staring at the screen to figure out the way to have a finished poem directly after reading the critiques. I've come to find the same happens when I'm sculpting. Professors are constantly mentioning, 'the process' to come to a finished artwork. I have found that I would rush the process in my art as well, to come to a finished product when the best route to take, atleast for myself, is a slower one. To allow the ideas to marinate, enjoy the period of time between the start and the end without rushing it. After I have all I want in the poem the last thing I tend to look at are the line breaks. I lay out the poem instinctively and follow up at the end by rereading it, and playing around with where the lines should end, and whether strophes would add to the final outcome of the piece. Sometimes I start out knowing that it is best to create a poem in chapters, by using strophes or stanzas. For me, the revision process is just as important as the idea of what a poem will be. Sometimes the only thing that the first version and the last share are the bones of an idea. I'll throw out everything but the core of it and start again. But this is just my outlook on it. I've been looking at my poetry seriously for the last five years, so I'm far from being adept at it. This is just my way of it. I'm sure others will explain their process in a better way then I. Being older and wiser then myself. :-p Seriously though. I just thought I would pipe in. I would love to read how others revise their works.

Good topic! :-)
Liz

[Scavella]

http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22825&poems

[Dunc]

I don't post anything I intend 'seriously' before, in my own mind, I've reached a certain level with it. It's at that stage that the critical reaction of others is valuable.

And if they don't agree that it's the greatest poem ever written, I sulk, stick the poem in the back of the drawer, and go on a long holiday.

Regards / Dunc

[LizzieB]

Thanks for the link, Scavella. This topic really interests me.

Liz

[Jeanne G]

Hey Arthur Henry

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious, excellent source for you question. I've spent many hours following the threads in Charon's Leaky Schooner. Not only do you get to see the revision process in action, but you get the sage advice of the mentors as they lead the less experienced writers through revision pergatory, and some of the angst and hair pulling moments that comes w/ it. The opportunity to recieve free one on one mentoring still blows my mind, I've just started there myself.



Jeanne

[Kaltica]

[color=red]arthur_henry:[/color]

I daresay there are as many different approaches to revision as there are poets. This is mine.

Before I go any further, I'll show you the outcome of this particular effort:

Thera, you left your cord
blood across the pharaoh's skyline.
Thutmose III, the only free man,
swore that there were none.

Mayan myths and courtiers
in Cathay would whisper
how you brought new meaning
to nightfall. Your tephra

was on more than tongues: Black
Sea shallows, White Mountain dendros
and Greenland ice.

Caldera, not cave, you hide
few secrets. Pastel frescoes of dancing
antelope seem just innocent
enough for Atlantis.
Whether or not this qualifies as "a good story well told" is certainly debatable. A finished product? For me, there is simply no such thing. As long as I'm alive there is always the chance that I'll wake up in the middle of the night screaming "What was I thinking?", rush to my keyboard and revise a poem. The word "successful" is equally meaningless to me. If it translates to "published" or "praised" let me say that I've had unmitigated dreck published, unspeakable tripe praised and better works ignored.

We start, then, with our story or theme. We've heard people say "write about what you know". Thus, we research our subject. Google everything. "Poetry is in the details," so the more nitty-gritty and the more perspectives we encounter on the theme, the better. This may increase our relevant vocabulary as we stumble across a useful word or expression. If we don't have an ending in mind already, this search will often produce some helpful candidates. What does research have to do with rewrites? We'll soon see.

Here are my notes on this one, written on the back of a used envelope (hey, it was good enough for the Gettysburg address!):

Thera, now Santorini (part of Greece)
A peaceful, affluent society believed to be the mythical Atlantis
Destroyed in 1628 B.C. by a volcanic eruption
Eruption visible at sunset in Egypt
Fallout reported in China and South American oral tradition
Tephra (ash) discoloured ice in Greenland, tree rings in California
Tsunamis wreck the Greek coast
1-mile wide caldera (crater) formed
Frescoes depict children boxing and antelopes dancing
Now we slap together a plot outline. We aren't concerned yet with how we're going to reveal the details of our story but in what order we'll present them.

Next we decide on an approach. Should it be one long boring metaphor? A linear tale with some silly jack-in-the-box ending? A cheesey pseudo-romance? In this case, obviously, we chose the latter tack.

Now we write our story in either prose or point form. This done--and contrary to what many newcomers may assume--we still haven't started to write poetry. Enter technique.

Given that "poetry lies between synonyms" the "hunt for the perfect word" begins. I won't bore you with the first draft; my "end products" are bad enough. Experienced poets will sneer, but a thesaurus can help us examine alternatives for overused words. Their real value, though, is in leading indirectly through relationships between synonyms to something truly original. We regoogle any tired phrases; maybe the context in which such expressions are used will get us thinking "laterally" (thus, the truism "poetry is lateral thinking stacked vertically"). If stuck, we read what we have and then take either a walk or a nap. Lazy beasts, we are not above letting our subconscious do the heavy lifting.

Needless to say this takes time. I don't care how many sittings Poe took to produce his efforts; the poet who cranks out a poem a day is merely taking out the garbage.

After a few days we are stuck with these as our first two strophes:

Thera, you left your crimson
blood across the pharoah's skyline.
That one and only free man
swore that there were none.

Mayan myths and courtiers
of Cathay would whisper
how you brought new meaning
to nightfall. Your tephra
Needless to say, we have an uncertain feeling about this. So we post the work in a forgiving forum. Damn, we misspelled "pharaoh". Critics touch on the very areas that concerned us: "crimson blood" is tired, the two incidences of "that" in S1-L3 and S1-L4 and the "of Cathay" aren't working.

"In Cathay" is an easy change; we considered "Cathay's courtiers" but two such proximate alliterations will grate. The revision of S1 is much tougher. Changing the first "that" to "this" doesn't help. Nor does:

[color=blue]He, the only free man,
swore that there were none.[/color]

It isn't entirely clear that "he" refers to the pharaoh. We waste days on this. Why do I say "waste"? Because if we had done our research more thoroughly the name of the pharaoh at that time, Tuthmose III (aka Thutmosis III), would have stuck out like a sore thumb. Damn!

Continuing our search for the perfect word, we hit a brick wall with the lifeless "crimson". Every candidate for the job proves woefully inadequate. The read-then-walk and read-then-nap tricks don't work. We're stumped.

It is time to cheat.

I will now give you what I will immodestly wager is the most valuable piece of advice that you will ever receive as a poet:

[color=red]Marry someone brighter than you are.[/color]

We turn to our spouse and start playing "word association". What is a word which might go with "blood"? We doggedly keep pumping our better half for answers, waiting for one which slots into L1 after "Thera, you left your". (Years earlier, in a rare stroke of great planning, we had the good sense to marry a nurse.) Around the tenth try our beloved produces "cord". Cord! It's a noun modifier, so it fits L1 and creates some quasi-interesting enjambment. Eureka!

So the Value Added Savior, J.R. Sherman, was right all along. This poetry stuff is easy! :)

[hrh]

I thought I'd post this; it might be of some value.
I came across this in a study of Yeats-- A Reader's Guide to Yeats -- by John Unterecker.
Apparently after Yeats had published his first book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, he later, except for a few, heavily revised most of the poems, and some he just deleted in later prints.
The book gives one example, of which I quote below:

The third Indian poem, "The Indian to His Love," tied to "The Indian upon God" by its imagery of islanded peahens dancing a smooth lawn near the water's edge, excellently illustrates the brilliant sort of revision Yeats practised in bringing frequently sentimental and often carelessly worded work to something very close to perfection.
Yeats had no illusion about the quality of those first drafts ("Nothing I did at that time had merit," he remarked in 1938 ), but he did see in them the framework for poetry. This, for example, is the first printed of the many versions of "The Indian to His Love":

An Indian Song

O WANDERER in the southern weather,
Our isle awaits us; on each lea
The pea-hens dance; in crimson feather
A parrot swaying on a tree
Rages at his own image in the enamelled sea. 5

There dreamy Time lets fall his sickle
And Life the sandals of her fleetness,
And sleek young Joy is no more fickle,
And Love is kindly and deceitless,
And all is over save the murmur and the sweetness. 10

There we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly, lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands—
Murmuring how far away are all earth’s feverish lands: 15

How we alone of mortals are
Hid in the earth’s most hidden part,
While grows our love an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the waves that softly round us laugh and dart;

One with the leaves; one with the dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days;
How when we die our shades will rove,
Dropping at eve in coral bays
A vapory footfall on the ocean’s sleepy blaze. 25


[see below for the revised edition]


The imprecise imagery of this early draft is carefully reworked in the poem's final form. The lush, romantic language is not entirely eleminated-- Yeats was enough of a craftsman to know that destruction of the tone of the poem would destroy the poem-- but the disorganized images are sorted out and the entire poem is tightened. A useless stanza is cancelled. And an early work with some good lines becomes a work of art.
Yeat's interest in the poem is evident in the care he lavished on its sucessive revisions. The most obvious change is the disappearance fo the second stanza with its abstractions: Time, Life, Joy, and Love; but other abstractions have also been banished. "We" are no longer hidden in "earth's most hidden part"; we are now hidden under very real "quiet boughs." There is also a gain in immediacy: the island is no longer "there"; it is "here". It no longer "awaits us"; we have already arrived.



THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.

Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:

How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart,

The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water's drowsy blaze.


I tried to find the other poems from his first book, to see how he went about revising his other works, but had no luck. If anyone can find anything on the net, or has a copy somewhere in their bookshelf, could you please post them, I'd really like to see how his work evolved.

hrh

[Harry R]

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lindenberger/ENG150/paper2.html

[Donner]

Arthur,

Here's a page I put on my Amplifier site (http://everypoet.net/donner/revision.html) that shows the bare bones of the revision process that I went through with one of my poems.

I tend to look at my writing as a puzzle. I like to see what happens to it when I move the pieces around. I usually don't stray too far from the original intent of a piece; if certain lines or pieces of the poem shift in a different direction, I'm more likely to use them as part of a new piece.

But that's just me.

Donner

[cookala]

Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to have two modes - either I’m heavily into writing new poems, or I’m heavily into critting or revising. When I’m in writing mode, I go with it - I take full advantage of my muse when she’s speaking to me. When she’s not, I generally get into revision or critiquing you guys.

The process starts this way: I generally jot down a new poem as it comes to me on paper, then pen edit on the paper until it starts getting really messy - then it goes into the computer. After that, surprisingly, my revision process runs similarly to Kalticas, although I don’t google half as much as I should. But I do make good use of the thesaurus, specifically because of the many nuances of word associations/ideas that are formed as you search for that “right” word (which can make all the difference in a poem.) I’ve hit on some great improvements that way.

Some poems are easier to revise than others. Sometimes I’ll study a poem and immediately know what to change, what to add. Other times I’ll study a poem and leave it as I found it, come back months later and then leave it as I found it again. It can be exasperating at times. I’ve come to believe that a poem must write itself, and that some of them just take longer to express themselves. I have poems that have been sitting for years, though most of them sit for a year or less before being posted. I may go through 10 revisions, or even more, on my own before I even think of posting to the board for crit. I try to bring the poem as far as I can on my own, until I’ve lost most of my objectivity and need “fresh eyes”, or feel like I can’t go any further with it.

I find that the longer I let a poem lie in between revisions the easier it is to gain fresh ideas when I do revise. But then, again, there are some poems that give me such problems that I post somewhat quickly - mostly in the hope that the crits I get will help me gain some ideas as to how to fix the problem. But luckily, these “problem children” have been rare occurrences for me.

There are certain things, such as sound and line breaks, that constantly shadow my thought process as I actively write or revise, and I’m just now (finally) beginning to develop a self-editing mechanism - I’m learning to listen to that inner voice that alerts me to parts of the poem that have a subtle nag about them, and to then dissect why. But, there are still times yet when that mechanism is off cavorting with my muse. My revision process is far from perfected - I’ve started to think that it’s a lot like writing poetry in that it takes a long time to get right.

One more thing that I sometimes do before posting a poem to the board for the first time is to print it out and work it on paper again. I don’t know why, but I find it easier to spot filler and cliches, find better line breaks, etc. Perhaps it’s the change from the computer screen to the white paper that does it. I do know that when I don’t do this, those sneaky poetry no-no’s do get by.

Here’s one poem I wrote not too long ago. I’m not sure it’s “finished” yet. I have the feeling that years from now, when I’ve grown even more, I’ll want to improve it yet again somehow. It’s been awhile since I looked at it, so I’m just going to include the original post and its 4 subsequent revision, changes based in part on the crits I got at each stage. There isn’t a lot of dramatic change from start to end, but you can see how I played and played with the wording in each strophe until rev4 was a good improvement from the original draft.



Stippled (Original draft - 1st posting)

That stipple brush with its
hard pounce and rhythmic crunch
against your half completed canvas,
has woken me; and now the daylight
hurts my eyes. This, your latest obsession,
has made me want to dye
my hair in three shades of notice-me-red.

You’ve crazy glued your eye balls
to your intimate visions, and have cast
me in bourgeois gray. You’ve turned
towards the colors of fresh cut blossoms
that sit, blushed open,
in a tall translucent vase. They await
your smugly executed brush strokes.


Stippled (Rev1)

That stipple brush with its
hard pounce and rhythmic crunch
against your half completed canvas,
has awakened me; and the daylight
hurts my eyes. This, your latest obsession,
has made me want to dye
my hair in three shades of notice-me-red.

Your eyes brim with clandestine visions,
but cast me in bourgeois gray. You’ve turned
toward the colors of your newly cut blossoms,
blushed open in a tall translucent vase. I notice
that your canvas lacks complimentary hues.

I’ve watched you work, learned enough
to create my own canvas. I will paint
a host of soldiers, leaving for war.
Can you hear the march of cadenced steps
echoing in the empty corridors?


Stippled (Rev2)

That stipple brush with its
hard pounce and rhythmic crunch
against your half completed canvas,
awakened me; now the daylight
hurts my eyes. Your latest obsession
has made me want to dye
my hair in three shades of notice-me-red.

Your eyes brim with clandestine visions,
yet cast me in bourgeois gray. You’ve turned
towards the colors of those newly cut blossoms
sitting in a tall, translucent vase -
will she be wearing those colors tonight?

I’ve watched you work, learned enough
to color my own canvas. I will paint
a host of soldiers, leaving for war.
Do you hear the march of cadenced steps
echoing in your empty corridors?


Stippled (Rev3)

That stipple brush with its
hard pounce and rhythmic crunch
against your half completed canvas,
awakened me; now the daylight
hurts my eyes. Your latest obsession
has made me want to dye
my hair in three shades of notice-me-red.

Your eyes brim with clandestine visions,
yet cast me in bourgeois gray. You=ve turned
towards the colors of those newly cut blossoms
sitting in a tall, translucent vase -
will she be wearing those colors tonight?

I=ve watched you work, learned enough
to paint my own canvas: a war hero
leaving for war. Do you hear the march
of her cadenced steps echo in your empty corridors?


Stippled (Rev4)

Your stipple brush pounced
hard against the canvas,
awakened me; the daylight
pains my eyes. This latest obsession
makes me want to dye
my hair three shades of notice-me-red.

Your eyes brim with clandestine visions,
yet cast me in bourgeois gray. You’ve turned
toward the color of newly cut blossoms
sitting in a tall, translucent vase -
will she wear those colors tonight?

Observing your technique, I’ve learned
to paint my own canvas: a soldier
leaving for war, her footsteps echoing
in your empty corridors.