Some Thoughts on Revising a Poetry: Windows into Form

The Windows into a Poem

A poem is different from prose because the language is heightened, compressed, and elevated. You know you are reading a poem when you can feel the sounds, the shape, the form, the pace, the beat, and the words shimmer. When you are writing and revising a poem, your job as a craftsperson is to find ways to lever the language so it is memorable with the richness of words.

To learn how to go back and back again into a poem is no easy task. Part of the discipline is finding how to look at the poem from different angles. For me, when I revise a poem, I intentionally bracket one way of viewing the poem and focus on it. As I have worked again and again, I have learned to understand better what makes my poems fall flat and what makes to shine. I developed that skill by keeping my focus on one aspect at a time, opening one window before I opened the next.

Eventually many of these windows will become doors that you intuitively enter. To start with, however, they must be more conscious. When you write a poem, they may be in the back of the mind. That is fine. A poem, as it is conceived, is subject. You are subjectively talking to yourself on the page.

Once it is on the page, it becomes object. It is something you can look at as its own entity. It is something you can begin, as you would any new object that you have created, to ask questions about how it is, or isn’t, working. It is something you can like in some ways and dislike in others. Before you own the poem and purchase what you have done, you need to see if it is doing exactly what you want.

In a way, going back into a poem is like inspecting a house that you want to buy. A poem has rooms that are called stanzas and hallways that are called lines. If you drove up to a house and had to assess if you wanted to buy it, you might, if the realtor wasn’t there, look in one window and see a large room with a fireplace and couch. If you walked around the house, you might see in another window a refrigerator and sink. And in another window, a room with a bed and dresser. In another, a shower and toilet. Each room gives you a feel for what the house, room by room, is like. As a poet, if you revisit a poem, you can look through any number of windows to ascertain what is going on in your poem.

The key to revision is learning how to make the poem talk and let itself speak of an experience so that we, as readers, are experiencing what is happening from first opening the door of a poem, walking into it, and moving from room to room.

As you revise a poem, look through different windows, formulate questions about how your poems does or doesn’t use these craft strategies. For example, if you look at how the sentence is parsed on the page, broken into lines, you may ask if the line breaks are creating enough forward momentum to keep the poem moving. You might want to ask if the poem needs more delays and pauses. If you look at sound, you might ask if the sounds on a line have some natural tension in them. Does the sound and line break and sentence structure create a certain rhythm?

You might even put these windows on a 3×5 card and add specific questions on each card. As an exercise, take out five cards and scribble down some questions. Then go back to your poem and see what you discover. When you go about revision, pull out a card and look at each separately. Learn to focus on that window into a poem.

Here are the windows that we will use to look at your poems line by line:

Window One:

The sentence/Syntax and Line

A poem’s pace and rhythm are modulated by the way the sentences, and sentence variety, interact.

Sentences can be simple, just the subject and verb and maybe an object. They can left-branching, putting information before we get to the subject and verb. This creates suspense and delay. They can be right-branching, adding information after the main clause and thereby extending the sentence and elaborating on the subject and verb. These right and left branching sentences are called complex.

Additionally, sentences can be compound, lopping sentences together. But whatever their form, how they are cut up in lines is the additional factor in pacing a poem.

The use of interrogative or imperative, declarative, and exclamatory all have different effects. An interrogative sentence asks the reader to pause, to think, and to hesitate. In some place in a poem, a good question works wonders.

Sentences in clusters can also be divided into two types: one is paratactic. These sentences are set next to one another with no attempt to show their connection, no rhetorical efforts to link one to the other. This order allows the reader to make his or her own connections. For example: The boxelder shaded the house. A cardinal flit from limb to limb. My mother took her last breath.  The other type of sentence cluster is hypotactic. In this case, you show the logical, temporal, causal, or spatial relationship among sentences. For example: When the cardinal flit from one branch to another in the deep shade of the boxelder, she took her last breath. A poem can veer from one to the other or all be the same. Each creates its own energy. Each asks the reader to be engaged differently, one more intuitive, the other more rational. Variety as with sound effects is key.  

Window Two:

Sonic Effects

Poems have a song-like quality. The sounds of each syllable, each word, and each word combination creates moods and shifts in emotion. Paying attention to how the vowels interplay with the consonants is a critical skill in writing a poem. Since English has the greatest number of words to draw upon—some 700,000 words—of all the other languages, the poet has much to choose from in composing a poem.

Window Three:

Line Break, Stanzas and Structure of Poem

The difference between prose and poetry comes down to the line being critical to a poem and not very critical to prose. There must be a reason for each line break. The line breaks are like the gas petal and break on a car. To pace a poem, the line breaks can stop a poem or speed it onto the next line. They can highlight certain words and phrases. They are like the brush stroke of a painter. They must be applied carefully.

When you look at a poem, it has a definite shape. One stanza. Two. Three. Two-line stanzas. Three-line stanza. And so on. As you fidget with a poem, look at how it falls on the page. Maybe the spacing of a couple works better than one long stanza. It gives the poem more air. Maybe short lines which highlight words work better than long lines that highlight narrative flow.

When you have the poem on the page, see what is happening in each stanza. For example, in stanza one you may have a speaker and another person or thing. So you could put He/lover. In next stanza, the characters may be the same. He/lover. But in third stanza, it shifts to an object and the narrator. So it would be He/River. Once you have a sense of how these parts are working, check to see if what happens at the start follows throughout the poem. Maybe it veers off and you lose track of the original set up. Revise to incorporate the original set up or add the river earlier in the poem so it would be He/lover/river.

Window Three:

Word Choice/Diction

Since the English language draws from Germanic, French, and Latin sources, the mix of words plays a big part of making a poem work. Latinate words tend to be more abstract. They also tend to be multisyllabic. They have prefixes and suffixes. They find themselves in academic papers and political speeches. Anglo-Saxon words which have a Germanic heritage tend to be succinct. They are often one syllable. They have stronger consonant resonance than Latinate words. They can hold long vowel sounds. They tend to be found in street talk and informal conversations.

Like having the royal family engage in a Texas barbecue, the mix of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words can create some interesting dynamics. In any poem, you always have an option of going high toned or low toned. You have 700,000 words to choose from, the most of any language. Poems spend hours mulling over what word works best in each line. If you pull each line apart, look at it in itself, each line should have some music, some words that sing, that make us want to listen to them.

Window Four:

Emotional Arc of a Poem

If a poem works, it must live up to its name—verse. There needs to be some turn in a poem. Reading a poem is like driving on the back roads, not a superhighway. It is life in the slow lane. If a poem has one mood, one emotional level, one point, it fails as a poem. A key question to ask of a poem is “What is the emotional arc of what is being said?” If a poem speaks about sadness is there a shift to joy or, at least, to humor? If a poem starts with delight, does it find its way into wisdom?

Window Five:

Compression/Intensification

Poems are not coal. They are diamond. They need to find their shape in the intense interaction of language. Getting rid of unnecessary words is one of the primary objectives of writing a poem.

Window Six:

Literal and Figurative Language

Poems exist though comparisons. They are not driven by logic or reasoning as much by metaphor and association. The shift from the literal, the detail, to the figurative, the metaphorical is fundamental for a poem to work. All the five windows can be opened with one good simile or metaphor. An associative leap can take a bland poem and shifts its tone, increase its emotional range, and drive its ideas to another level. A good question to ask is, “What are my metaphors doing in this poem?” Often what a poem lacks is the shift from the literal to the figurative.

Format for Workshop: Learning to Ask the Right Questions and Opening the Right Windows

By using these windows into a poem, the workshop format changes radically. Instead of people jumping in with “I like this” and “I like that” or “why not change this word or that word”, the focus shifts to what windows best open up what the poem can do. If we look at line breaks, word choice, figurative language, or emotional arc, participants can hone on what is actually happening  in the poem.

To explain how this new approach works, I explained what we would be doing. Here is how I explained the process the participants:

I want to do the workshop slightly different. Normally after the poet reads the poem, we go in and comment on what is good, what we like, what is effective. Then I ask if the poet wants to go to another level and we look at “What ifs” that might change, clear up, improve, or alter what is happening in the poem.

We will still do that.

The adjustment I want to make is to avoid the scatter shot manner of most workshops. Someone will say something about a line or a word or a stanza, then someone else will talk about the title, and someone else will talk about its emotional impact or what not. Instead of doing that, I want to reign in the conversation. I want us to focus on certain aspects of the poem. I want to go slower and stay more focused than we normally do in workshops.

I want to make the workshop a chance to go in the SLOW LANE and make it an opportunity to pay close attention to one of the six windows I mentioned earlier.

So, if you are willing, as we workshop the poem, I will ask after the poet reads his or her poem that we look at some particular questions as a window into the poem.

The reason I am doing this is because, I think, what is often missing in workshops is importance of paying attention to what Questions a poet could ask to see what is happening in a poem. I want you to hear the type of questions I ask myself that, in turn, you can ask yourself. To make poems work, one of the skills we need to have is knowing what are the right questions we need to ask of a poem.

As we more tightly focus on what is happening—or not happening—in the poem, we can better understand and make the right diagnosis of what needs work to improve the health of the poem. Emily Dickinson called it surgery. Others call is re-visioning, seeing the poem with different eyes. Still others call it going to the next level.

I will then follow the familiar process of your making comments and asking, if the poets wants, to get to some “What ifs?”

As we workshop the poems, I will also (with your permission) make some “What if” moves that you might consider. As such, what I want you to see is in real time what revision looks like, at least for me. I may cut a word or phrase, look at better use of sounds, highlight the emotional arc (and shifts) in a poem, shift lines or even stanzas just to in real time show how the revisioning can happen. I will also ask questions that I will type and insert into the poem that the poet can look at later. Throughout this process, I will incorporate some of your suggestions, see how they may work, look at what happens to the poem. We can see how it changes before our eyes. Some things might work. Some not. But whatever happens, we can see how a poem can evolve and still keep its integrity. It may change what you wanted, or thought you wanted, the poem to say. That may be a surprise for you. That may be troublesome for you. In any case, whatever is done is done in the spirit of making the poem work the best it can and with the faith that you can do or not do, accept or reject, anything that is brought up.

 That is what revision is: playing with options. The hard part is finding and developing the skills to ask the right questions. The “What if” process is never easy. Some poets, as Mary Oliver, made up to 40 drafts in any one poem. 40 What ifs. William Butler Yeats wrote what he wanted to work into a poem as prose and, from the prose, honed the words into a poem. Richard Wilbur took as much as a year to write his poems. That’s just how it works. It takes time and effort and a huge amount of faith that the poem will find its way into being what it is. Even as you do revision by yourself, some changes make a poem worse, some work. In the end, you have to make the final call.

I am hoping this process we use will help you to ask the right questions of your poem so you can trust you can let it grow into the magnificent testimony of what you, and the poem, needed to say.

I will, in turn, send you this workshop sheet every week so you can see what we did on the different poems and what questions I have asked. You may have other questions that come up during the process which I will note on the poem.

My hope is that you will develop a repertoire of questions and a toolbox of windows into your poems that you can use in other poems. For most of us, there are some aspects of craft we do better than others. As we learn to ask how we might work more effectively with sound, our poems will get stronger in the use of strong and weak vowels and the wide range of consonants. Likewise, if we get more comfortable using our material imagination and blending the literal (the detail) with the figurative (the metaphoric), we will become more skilled in pushing the range and scope of our poems.

I would ask if anything is not working for you, please, please, please contact me and let’s work out what you need and what would be more helpful. We are all a work-in-progress. Let’s be supportive of eah other and make sure this is a positive experience for all of us.

So first off, do you feel ok with our working in this fashion?

If so, we are off and running. Any hesitations on your part, whatever they are, please vocalize them.
This process I have done when working individually with some poets. This will be my first time using it with a group. I would appreciate any comments, yea or nay, as we work through the process.