Making More of Revision

         

During revision discussions, we poets hear a lot about compression, reducing clutter, and cutting out the non-essential. Who hasn’t sat in a poetry class or workshop and been told that less is more? So when someone tells us to add more, to expand, to keep going, we might be hesitant to pay attention.

But we should pay attention. The less-is-more principle is often good advice, but it’s not always good advice. As I once heard Mark Doty say, Sometimes more is more.

Too often we start revising and hacking away at the poem before it’s even fully written. We quit before we’ve given the poem life, before we’ve discovered its full potential, before we’ve found its real material.

Stephen Dunn addresses the topic of revision in a 2007 interview in Pedestal Magazine:
 
"A fairly new experience that I’ve been having is revision as expansion. Most of us know about revision as an act of paring down. Several years ago, in looking at my work, I saw that I was kind of a page or page and a half kind of poet, which meant that I was thinking of closure around the same time in every poem. I started to confound that habit. By mid-poem, I might add a detail that the poem couldn’t yet accommodate. That’s especially proven to be an interesting and useful way of revising poems that seem too slight or thin; to add something, put in an obstacle. The artificial as another way to arrive at the genuine—an old story, really."

Before you begin to strip down your poem or abandon it as no good or decide it’s good enough as it is, first consider how you might expand your poem. The following expansion strategies just might help you to discover your poem’s true potential and arrive at the genuine.

1. Choose a single poem by someone else, one that has strong diction. Take ten words from that poem and, in no particular order, plug them into your own draft. Make them make sense within the context of your poem, adjusting your context as needed. Or let the words introduce an element of the strange, a touch of the surreal.

2. Find the lifeless part of your poem. This is often the part where your mind begins to wander when you read the poem aloud. Open up space there and keep on writing in that space. Repeat elsewhere if needed. Remember that freewriting can occur not only while drafting but also while revising.

3. Find three places in the poem where you could insert a negative statement. Then go into the right margin of your draft and write those statements. Add them to the poem. By being contrary, you might add depth and richness to the poem.

4. Go into the right margin and write some kind of response to each line, perhaps its opposite, perhaps a question. The material that you add to the right margin just might be your best material, the real material. Bring what works into the poem. Make friends with the right margin; good things happen out there.

5. Put something into your poem that seemingly doesn’t belong, perhaps some kind of food, a tree, a piece of furniture, a policeman, or a dog. Elaborate.

6. Add a color and exploit it throughout the poem. This is often a surprisingly effective enlivening strategy, one that can alter the tone of the poem.

7. Go metaphor crazy. Add ten metaphors or similes to the poem. Keep the keepers.

8. Look up the vocabulary of an esoteric subject that has nothing to do with your poem. The subject might be mushroom foraging, astronomy, cryogenics, perfume-making, bee keeping, the Argentinian tango, or zombies. Make a list of at least ten words. Include a variety of parts of speech. Import the words into your poem. Develop as needed.

9. Pick any one concrete object in your poem and personify it throughout the poem. For example, if there’s a rock, give it feelings, let it observe and think, give it a voice. As the object comes alive, so may the poem.

10. Midway or two-thirds into your poem, insert a story, perhaps something from the newspaper, a book you’ve read, a fable, or a fairy tale. Don’t use the entire story, just enough of it to add some texture and weight to your poem. Your challenge is to find the connection between this new material and what was already in the poem.

Now go into your folder of old, abandoned poems, the ones you gave up on when you decided they just weren’t going anywhere. Then get out some of your recent poems that feel merely good enough, the ones that never gave you that jolt of excitement we get when a poem is percolating. Finally, return to some of the poems that you’ve submitted and submitted with no success, those poor rejects.

Mark all of these poems as once again in progress. Now apply some of the expansion strategies and see if you can breathe new life into the poems. Remember that this kind of revision is not a matter of merely making the poem longer; it’s a matter of making the poem better.


(This craft tip appears in my book The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop.)

National Poetry Revision Month

          

Making More of Revision


During revision discussions, we poets hear a lot about compression, reducing clutter, and cutting out the non-essential. Who hasn’t sat in a poetry class or workshop and been told that less is more? So when someone tells us to add more, to expand, to keep going, we might be hesitant to pay attention.

But we should pay attention. The less-is-more principle is often good advice, but it’s not always good advice. As I once heard Mark Doty say, Sometimes more is more.

Too often we start revising and hacking away at the poem before it’s even fully written. We quit before we’ve given the poem life, before we’ve discovered its full potential, before we’ve found its real material.

Stephen Dunn addresses the topic of revision in a 2007 interview in The Pedestal Magazine:
 
          A fairly new experience that I’ve been having is revision as expansion. Most
          of us know about revision as an act of paring down. Several years ago, in
          looking at my work, I saw that I was kind of a page or page and a half kind of
          poet, which meant that I was thinking of closure around the same time in every
          poem. I started to confound that habit. By mid-poem, I might add a detail that the  
          poem couldn’t yet accommodate. That’s especially proven to be an interesting
          and useful way of revising poems that seem too slight or thin; to add something,
          put an obstacle in. The artificial as another way to arrive at the genuine—an old
          story, really.

Before you begin to strip down your poem or abandon it as no good or decide it’s good enough as it is, first consider how you might expand your poem. The following expansion strategies just might help you to discover your poem’s true potential and arrive at the genuine.

1. Choose a single poem by someone else, one that has strong diction. Take ten words from that poem and, in no particular order, plug them into your own draft. Make them make sense within the context of your poem, adjusting your context as needed. Or let the words introduce an element of the strange, a touch of the surreal.

2. Find the lifeless part of your poem. This is often the part where your mind begins to wander when you read the poem aloud. Open up space there and keep on writing in that space. Repeat elsewhere if needed. Remember that freewriting can occur not only while drafting but also while revising.

3. Find three places in the poem where you could insert a negative statement. Then go into the right margin of your draft and write those statements. Add them to the poem. By being contrary, you might add depth and richness to the poem.

4. Go into the right margin and write some kind of response to each line, perhaps its opposite, perhaps a question. The material that you add to the right margin just might be your best material, the real material. Bring what works into the poem. Make friends with the right margin; good things happen out there.

5. Put something into your poem that seemingly doesn’t belong, perhaps some kind of food, a tree, a piece of furniture, a policeman, or a dog. Elaborate.

6. Add a color and exploit it throughout the poem. This is often a surprisingly effective enlivening strategy, one that can alter the tone of the poem.

7. Go metaphor crazy. Add ten metaphors or similes to the poem. Keep the keepers.

8. Look up the vocabulary of an esoteric subject that has nothing to do with your poem. The subject might be mushroom foraging, astronomy, cryogenics, perfume-making, bee keeping, the Argentinian tango, or zombies. Make a list of at least ten words. Include a variety of parts of speech. Import the words into your poem. Develop as needed.

9. Pick any one concrete object in your poem and personify it throughout the poem. For example, if there’s a rock, give it feelings, let it observe and think, give it a voice. As the object comes alive, so may the poem.

10. Midway or two-thirds into your poem, insert a story, perhaps something from the newspaper, a book you’ve read, a fable, or a fairy tale. Don’t use the entire story, just enough of it to add some texture and weight to your poem. Your challenge is to find the connection between this new material and what was already in the poem.

Now go into your folder of old, abandoned poems, the ones you gave up on when you decided they just weren’t going anywhere. Then get out some of your recent poems that feel merely good enough, the ones that never gave you that jolt of excitement we get when a poem is percolating. Finally, return to some of the poems that you’ve submitted and submitted with no success, those poor rejects.
Mark all of these poems as once again in progress. Now apply some of the expansion strategies and see if you can breathe new life into the poems. Remember that this kind of revision is not a matter of merely making the poem longer; it’s a matter of making the poem better.


(This craft tip appears in my book The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop.)

Some Revision Ideas for Poetry Month

I'm posting here the Craft Tip I contributed to my craft book, The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. You might find it helpful as you work on new poems this month. You might also find it useful for working on poems you wrote months, or even years, ago. Enjoy! And prosper!

Click Cover for Amazon

Craft Tip #29: Making More of Revision

During revision discussions, we poets hear a lot about compression, reducing clutter, and cutting out the non-essential. Who hasn’t sat in a poetry class or workshop and been told that less is more? So when someone tells us to add more, to expand, to keep going, we might be hesitant to pay attention.

But we should pay attention. The less-is-more principle is often good advice, but it’s not always good advice. As I once heard Mark Doty say, Sometimes more is more.

Too often we start revising and hacking away at the poem before it’s even fully written. We quit before we’ve given the poem life, before we’ve discovered its full potential, before we’ve found its real material.

Stephen Dunn addresses the topic of revision in a 2007 interview in The Pedestal Magazine:

          A fairly new experience that I’ve been having is revision as expansion. Most
          of us know about revision as an act of paring down. Several years ago, in
          looking at my work, I saw that I was kind of a page or page and a half kind of
          poet, which meant that I was thinking of closure around the same time in every
          poem. I started to confound that habit. By mid-poem, I might add a detail that the   
          poem couldn’t yet accommodate. That’s especially proven to be an interesting
          and useful way of revising poems that seem too slight or thin; to add something,
          put an obstacle in. The artificial as another way to arrive at the genuine—an old
          story, really.

Before you begin to strip down your poem or abandon it as no good or decide it’s good enough as it is, first consider how you might expand your poem. The following expansion strategies just might help you to discover your poem’s true potential and arrive at the genuine.

1. Choose a single poem by someone else, one that has strong diction. Take ten words from that poem and, in no particular order, plug them into your own draft. Make them make sense within the context of your poem, adjusting your context as needed. Or let the words introduce an element of the strange, a touch of the surreal.

2. Find the lifeless part of your poem. This is often the part where your mind begins to wander when you read the poem aloud. Open up space there and keep on writing in that space. Repeat elsewhere if needed. Remember that freewriting can occur not only while drafting but also while revising.

3. Find three places in the poem where you could insert a negative statement. Then go into the right margin of your draft and write those statements. Add them to the poem. By being contrary, you might add depth and richness to the poem.

4. Go into the right margin and write some kind of response to each line, perhaps its opposite, perhaps a question. The material that you add to the right margin just might be your best material, the real material. Bring what works into the poem. Make friends with the right margin; good things happen out there.

5. Put something into your poem that seemingly doesn’t belong, perhaps some kind of food, a tree, a piece of furniture, a policeman, or a dog. Elaborate.

6. Add a color and exploit it throughout the poem. This is often a surprisingly effective enlivening strategy, one that can alter the tone of the poem.

7. Go metaphor crazy. Add ten metaphors or similes to the poem. Keep the keepers.

8. Look up the vocabulary of an esoteric subject that has nothing to do with your poem. The subject might be mushroom foraging, astronomy, cryogenics, perfume-making, bee keeping, the Argentinian tango, or zombies. Make a list of at least ten words. Include a variety of parts of speech. Import the words into your poem. Develop as needed.

9. Pick any one concrete object in your poem and personify it throughout the poem. For example, if there’s a rock, give it feelings, let it observe and think, give it a voice. As the object comes alive, so may the poem.

10. Midway or two-thirds into your poem, insert a story, perhaps something from the newspaper, a book you’ve read, a fable, or a fairy tale. Don’t use the entire story, just enough of it to add some texture and weight to your poem. Your challenge is to find the connection between this new material and what was already in the poem.

Now go into your folder of old, abandoned poems, the ones you gave up on when you decided they just weren’t going anywhere. Then get out some of your recent poems that feel merely good enough, the ones that never gave you that jolt of excitement we get when a poem is percolating. Finally, return to some of the poems that you’ve submitted and submitted with no success, those poor rejects.

Mark all of these poems as once again in progress. Now apply some of the expansion strategies and see if you can breathe new life into the poems. Remember that this kind of revision is not a matter of merely making the poem longer; it’s a matter of making the poem better.

From Manuscript to Book: Editing and Revising

All manuscripts accepted for publication by Terrapin Books are carefully edited. Several months before I plan to publish the book, I send instructions to the poet on how to prepare the manuscript for editing. I then go through the manuscript and mark it up with red comments. I send it back to the poet who then makes the fixes and returns the manuscript to me.

Typically, we go back and forth a few times, negotiating, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, and eventually arriving at the final version of the manuscript. (Well, not quite final as there are invariably some additional errors that reveal themselves once the book is formatted and returned to the poet for proofreading.)

Following is a Q&A I conducted with Michael T. Young about the editing and revising process we engaged in with his forthcoming book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water. It should give you a good behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into book production at Terrapin Books.


Diane:  I recall that when I accepted your manuscript I right away suggested a structural change, that is, I suggested that your three sections become five. Do you recall why I made that suggestion? How did you implement it and to what effect? How difficult was it to make that change?

Michael:  Yes, I recall you felt the poems were dense and thought-provoking and, consequently, that some extra space could help them. This change made sense to me since I intend my poems to be thought-provoking. Grouping them into shorter sections would provide greater thematic focus and, at the same time, more intervals in which the reader could digest all they elicit.

I tackled the restructuring by rereading the whole collection and looking for additional thematic arcs within each section. Given that the original first two sections were rather long and the final section rather short, I focused on those first two sections. It was somewhat easy to break these into four sections with coherent thematic arcs. The first section was the easiest, requiring no shuffling of the poems. The other three new sections required a little tinkering with the order of poems both within and across sections to give them coherence. This was also influenced by the need to reorder poems from the final section which had an abundance of poems with water imagery. Moving those poems across the other three prior sections helped create connections across sections and filled in gaps within sections that were wanting. The process was somewhat slow since every reshuffling required I reread entire sections and try to hear both the individual pieces and how the whole related.


Diane:  Early on I was also concerned about your overuse of light images and the repetition of the word light. Were you aware of the excess when you assembled the collection? How did you go about fixing this? How did those edits change the manuscript?

Michael:  I’ve always had a penchant for light and related images. Even my previous two collections have an abundance of such images. When one is publishing individual poems in journals this is, of course, not an issue. It’s only an issue when assembling a collection.

I employed a number of approaches to handle the abundance of light references and light images in The Infinite Doctrine of Water. In some instances, I moved a poem to a different location to soften its resonance with other poems that had similar imagery. In some instances, I changed a word or simply deleted it. In still other instances I changed the word light or an image of light to darkness or some related image that was opposite. These changes resulted in a more dynamic relationship among all the poems in the book, even those that use light images. As Donald Justice wrote, “To shine is to be surrounded by the dark.”


Diane:  Point of view was another issue. I noticed an excessive reliance on first person I. Tell us how you addressed this point of view issue. How did the changes you made affect the collection?

Michael:  This abundance wasn’t as difficult to correct as the use of light. A few of the poems were in first person in only a minor way. That is, a few of them had a first person pronoun in only one sentence but the rest of the poem made no direct reference to the speaker. Removing the single first person pronoun from these poems was rather easy. This, combined with reshuffling some of the other second and third person poems from the final section throughout the rest of the collection, provided for a balance the collection didn’t have in its original form. I was very grateful to rework this aspect of the book through the editing process.


Diane:  I also made editorial suggestions for a number of individual poems. What kinds of changes did I suggest? Were you always agreeable? Give us a few examples of poems that were revised during this process of preparing your manuscript for book form.

Michael:  Suggested changes ranged from comma insertions and stanza breaks to changes of diction and a few line deletions. I wasn’t always amenable to changes. For instance, with the poem “Sage.” This poem contained the word light and you suggested it be removed and another word used. But I felt any alternatives I came up with didn’t say exactly what needed to be said or failed rhythmically to keep with the tone of the poem. It was one of the few that I didn’t change.

But there were a number of good changes made. For instance, in “Close Reading,” we changed the word skirred to skirted. Although skirred was the more precise word, it is unfamiliar and likely to have been read as a typo by readers. This was something you pointed out and I thought it was a reasonable assumption. So the change seemed a good one.

A few concluding lines were removed altogether, as in the poems “Setting Fires” and “Paperclip.” Both these poems were afflicted by my old habit of providing the reader with a kind of summation which dampened what was otherwise a strong poem. Removing such summations allowed the poems to resolve in a strong image.


Diane:  Your original title was Turpentine. I recall saying that while I very much liked the poem from which that title was taken, I didn’t think it fit or did enough work for the collection. I suggested several other possibilities. What made you choose The Infinite Doctrine of Water?

Michael:  The Infinite Doctrine of Water was another title I had been considering. In fact, when I prepare manuscripts for submission, I often prepare both a full-length collection and a chapbook to send to publishers. In preparing the chapbook which corresponded to this full-length collection, I was using the title The Infinite Doctrine of Water for that chapbook.

Like light, water also is a very important image to me and moves throughout all my poetry. So the change was really an easy one. In fact, as soon as we changed it and were, at the same time, in the midst of revising and reordering, it became immediately obvious that “The Voice of Water” was the ideal final poem for the collection, when originally it was earlier in the final section. Additionally, would it be too much to say that as soon as we changed the title, ideas for the book cover flooded my mind? For all these reasons, the title change seemed immediately right.



Michael T. Young is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada, 2014) and Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press, 2000). He is also the author of the chapbooks, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press, 2013), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award, and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press, 1997). His work has been published in such journals as Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Little Patuxent Review, Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He is a past recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has been featured on Verse Daily.


Michael’s book, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, will be released on April 1. It is now available for
Pre-orders.

Bay to Ocean Conference

This past weekend I drove to Maryland for the 18th annual Bay to Ocean Conference held at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills. I was one of three poets on the program, each of us leading a workshop. The other two poets were Sue Ellen Thompson and Sandra Beasley. Sue Ellen, who oversees the poetry part of the program, also moderated a poetry panel called “Should Poems Be Angry?”

I arrived in Maryland on Friday afternoon as the drive was too long for me to have made it the day of the conference, so I stayed two nights at the Hilton Gardens Hotel in nearby Grasonville. I made a great choice with that hotel as it was beautiful. My room was very big with two queen beds, a desk, fridge, microwave, tv, chair, desk, and a gorgeous view of the wharf and its yachts. I brought some drafts of new poems to work on so considered this weekend also a mini-retreat, and since it cost me more to go than I was paid, I also considered it a mini-vacation. How's that for rationalizing?

 My room—it was even bigger than it looks

The view out my window—see the snow on the water?

Approximately 250 people attended the conference which was sold out weeks in advance. Most of the presenters were prose writers, approximately two dozen of them, so most of the attendees were also prose writers.

I had 14 poets in my workshop and we had a lovely session. I led the group through a freewriting activity which generated a lot of writing. Then we mined the material for the poem hiding in there. My hope is that new poems will emerge from the workshop and that participants left not only with a strategy they can re-employ on their own to generate new material but also with a handful of revision strategies.

I had a nice lunch with one of my poets who I’d met back in December. Then I attended a panel on poetry journals. After that I felt in need of some nap time, so headed back to my lovely hotel. After a substantial snooze, I again enjoyed room service for dinner. Eloise at the Plaza.

I headed home early Sunday morning and arrived there just as the snow was getting down to serious business.

I love doing workshops and was happy to have been included in this year’s conference.

Now I need to go write some angry poems. Maybe a curse poem.

 Bookstore—The Crafty Poet is festooned with orange post-its

Revision: Making Persian Carpets Out of Poems

My July 1 Poetry Newsletter included a wonderful Craft Tip contributed by Connecticut Poet Laureate Dick Allen. Entitled “Sometimes, Beware the Good Poem,” the piece cautions against over-revising a poem.

Guilty! At least sometimes. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the poem really isn’t good and I’m trying to put lipstick on it when I should just murder it and put it out of its misery. Sometimes the poem is good, but that’s all it is and I’m trying too hard to achieve greatness. Sometimes the poem is good, maybe even really good, one of my better ones, but it came so easily that I don’t trust it, so I give it a good beating. Sometimes I’m just stalling getting back to the blank page and beginning the next poem.

Allen calls over-revision “one of the greatest sins of contemporary poetry writing” and blames the sin on our “listening overly hard to suggestions from a mentor or other participants in a poetry workshop.” He issues this warning: “Over-revision tends to tamp down a poem, to suck out its life, to leave in it too little of its original passion.” And lest we be overly concerned with perfection, he reminds us that “legendary Persian carpets purposely contain an errant thread.”

Allen’s words clearly resonated with my newsletter subscribers, a number of whom wrote to tell me how good it was to read those words.

And yet shortly after the newsletter went out, I happened upon this from Stephen Dunn:

I'm an inveterate reviser. I'm just always doing that. In my lifetime, there have been a handful of poems that have been finished without much revision, but only a handful. I often go to Yaddo or McDowell in the summers and tend to generate a lot of work without worrying about completing it. Then I spend the next year refining those poems and getting them in shape. A fairly new experience that I’ve been having is revision as expansion. Most of us know about revision as an act of paring down. Several years ago, in looking at my work, I saw that I was kind of a page or page and a half kind of poet, which meant that I was thinking of closure around the same time in every poem. I started to confound that habit. By mid-poem, I might add a detail that the poem couldn't yet accommodate. That's especially proven to be an interesting and useful way of revising poems that seem too slight or thin; to add something, put an obstacle in. The artificial as another way to arrive at the genuine—an old story, really.
                                   —from an interview in The Pedestal Magazine, issue 41, 2007

This also strikes me as good advice and not at all contradictory. We've all sucked the life out of some poems, but haven’t we all also written the poem that quit too soon? Haven’t we all abandoned a poem without ever having worked hard enough on it to discover its real potential, its real subject? Haven’t we gone in fear of obstacles?

And then we hear so much about compression, about reducing clutter, cutting out details, getting rid of this and that. How many times have you been told that “less is more”? So when someone tells us to add more, to expand, to keep going, we might be hesitant to pay attention.

But we should pay attention. We don’t want to kill a poem, but we also don’t want to fail to give it life.

The March Poetry Newsletter included Fleda Brown’s Craft Tip, “Putting Obstructions Along Your Poem’s Path.” Brown offers a number of terrific and specific suggestions for getting your poem to its full potential. Suggestion #3 has been useful to me:

Once you have something going, some inclination in a poem, pick a book of someone else’s poems. Choose a book whose poems draw you at the moment. Go through it and make a list of more than a dozen words that appeal to you. Make yourself use them in your poem. Since you already have your mind on the poem, the words you choose will magically relate, one way or the other.

What else can we do to “arrive at the genuine,” that is, to discover the poem’s potential?

Here are some strategies that I’ve found useful during revision:

1. Instead of taking the ten words out of an entire book, take them out of a single poem, one that has strong diction. Then plug those words into your own draft. Expand / revise as needed.

2. Find the lifeless part or parts. Open up space there and keep on writing. Freewriting can occur at any time during drafting and revising.

3. Go into the right margin of your draft and find 3 places where you could insert a negative statement.

4. Go into the right margin and write some kind of response to each line, perhaps its opposite, perhaps a question.

5. Go metaphor crazy. Add 10 metaphors or similes to the poem. Keep the keepers.

6. When you have several drafts and feel that the poem is getting close to done, experiment with stanza breaks. This will expose weak spots as well as unnecessary repetitions and excessive verbiage. Break the poem into quatrains. Then break it into 3-line stanzas, then 2. Don’t do this early in the drafting as it may incline you to write and revise to fit the form. Save until the end so that you find the form that fits the poem.

Then ask yourself, Have I left in the errant thread? And consider leaving it there.

Do You Dare Talk about Syntax?

I love syntax but wouldn't dare mention it in public. It's not something normal people talk about. But then writers aren't all that normal, are they?

I was delighted, actually a bit thrilled, to discover an article in this month's The Writer's Chronicle on this very topic. "The Geography of Sentences" is by Emily Brisse, a high school English teacher (yay, Emily!) and writer. The title is particularly apt as this Minnesota writer is apparently also an amateur naturalist.

Adapted from Emily's MFA graduate lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts, the article tackles the subject few writers want to tackle: syntax. It's a topic we know is important, but it's a hard concept to pin down and talk about. Even when we're working on syntax, we often have a hard time defining what we're doing or articulating why it's important.

What do we mean when we say that a piece of writing is wonderful, beautiful, or moving? We might mean that we liked the images, the metaphors, the word choices. We have no problem pointing to examples of those. But we also probably mean that we liked the sentences, that is, the syntax, and that we have a harder time illustrating and talking about.

And yet, as Emily points out, syntax is one of the elements we need to work on in our revisions. She regards  the sentence as "one of our most powerful tools." To illustrate what she means by sentences with good syntax, the ones she refers to as "magical incantations," she frequently quotes from Louise Erdrich' s Love Medicine.

Although the focus of the article is on prose, poets will find the article just as valuable as prose writers will, maybe even more so. A prose writer can get away with a few bad sentences; a poet can't. Emily considers that old bugaboo—grammar—but she's more interested in how writers "manipulate chunks of language . . . to achieve certain effects," how they use syntax to increase the intensity of words and to move the reader. We can do this without being able to name the grammatical parts of the sentence.

What is the effect of a short sentence? a long one? an alternation between the two? a fragment? What happens if you move this part of your sentence to another part of the sentence? if you reverse the order of words? if you delay the verb until the end of the sentence? Emily is interested in how the arrangement of words in a sentence conveys and enhances meaning. She's also interested in the way a sentence looks (its shape), and she's interested in how it means. She also considers the syntax as symbol—something I'd never thought of before.

She speaks about parallelism, onomatopoeia, and repetition. She talks about breaking the rules. She talks about syntax.

I found this article enlightening and useful. It's making me look more closely at lines and sentences. It will do the same for you. It's even making me talk in public about syntax.

By the way, if you're not already subscribing to The Writer's Chronicle, correct that error as soon as possible.

Here's a syntax challenge for you: Using an egg as your topic, write a poem that's one long sentence. Keep it going for at least 30 lines of substantial length. Put it away. Go back to it. Now break that sentence into smaller parts. Some parts sentences. Some not.

What Time Is the Right Time?

Recently I received an email from a young woman who took a workshop I gave a few years ago at a Writers Conference. She later reappeared in another workshop I led at my local library. Since then she's popped up at other events. I'm always happy to see her. She's a wonderful poet.

In her email this woman asked, How do you know if a poem is ready for submission? I read one of your interviews and noted your advice against sending out work too early. Is there a way to tell when it's done and ready to be submitted?

Here, with some additions, is what I replied:

That's a hard question and I don't think there's a definitive answer. If there is, I don't have it. Of course, one has to let go at a certain point and say Done—or at least Done for now.

Before sending out, I make sure I've applied all my revision checks—have I polished the diction? Gone line by line looking for words that could be jazzed up? Have I maximized sounds? Have I weeded out dead syllables? Does the format of the poem feel right? Does it look right? Do I feel like Yes, this is just the right form for this poem?

In order to answer these questions, I do a line by line interrogation. Here's where the poem can't be rushed. In the first flush of excitement, when you know you've written something worth writing, when you feel that you've said something you haven't said before, it's easy to decide to send that poem right off to the journal you've been dying to get in. I stopped doing that years ago because I found that I was always sorry. Invariably, a week or several weeks later, I found something I'd missed, something that needed to be fixed. Sometimes that something was pretty obvious and I had to wonder how I'd missed it. I'd missed it because I'd submitted in haste.

After I've taken a poem through multiple drafts, I read the most recent draft silently to myself and then I read it aloud. I record myself and play back, listening for spots that sag. If I find myself daydreaming during the playback, I can be sure that's just what the reader will do too. Sometimes this feels self-indulgent, almost egomaniacal—sitting there listening to the sound of my own voice over and over. And yet it's one of the most useful revision strategies I have. Is the poem a comfortable read? If not, is something wrong with the rhythm? or the line breaks? I would never send out a poem that I hadn't yet spoken aloud and heard multiple times.

If I get to the point where I begin to suspect that I'm leeching the life out of the poem, then it may be time to stop and let go. If I begin to suspect that I'm just putting off moving onto new work, then it's time to let go. Am I revising or stalling?

After I've submitted the poem numerous times and gotten nothing but rejection, I may take another look at the poem. But rejection is not always a reliable indicator. I've had poems rejected many times that eventually were published in good journals and received lots of praise.

I always put what I think is a Done poem into my folder for several weeks. I never send out a poem that's just hot off the printer. I let it sit. I want to forget about the poem. Get uninvolved with it. Eventually I dig it out and read it again. Does it still surprise and delight me? Am I still excited about the poem? Does it still touch me? If it's a sad poem, do I have to wrestle a bit with tears? Do I even sort of wonder, Gee, did I really write this? Not bad, not bad at all. But Uh oh, is that a bad verb in there? A missing comma? Yes, yes. I fix the little devils and then send the poem on its way.

Revision in The Poetry Gymnasium

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I am not quite finished with this book, but I want to mention it now in case some of you might be interested in getting it as a holiday gift. This craft book would be a perfect gift for any poets you know who are looking for instruction and stimulation. Perhaps you yourself are just such a poet? Then treat yourself.

The book seems a bit pricey at $35, but it's a textbook so is priced as such. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't use it outside of the classroom. If you're a teacher looking for a good poetry textbook, this could be the very one. If you're a poet working on your own but hoping to expand your knowledge, this book really does contain the classroom.

If you keep in mind that Hunley offers 94 exercises, then the price does not seem so high. But there's more, much more. Each exercise is preceded by a rationale and some background (tons of information here) and then followed by model poems.

I found Hunley's revision strategies particularly interesting and exciting. I recalled and looked up Kim Addonizio's words about revision in Ordinary Genius: "If you don't think your work needs revision, here's a tip: Don't try to be a poet. You will never—and I mean never—be any good." Firm, but true. She goes on to say: "If you take your art seriously, you will write the poem again and again until you get it right, or as close to right as you can make it. Revision separates the professionals from the amateurs and the wannabes."

Sometimes, of course, that's easier said than done. You have the poem in front of you, ten drafts in. You know you've got something worth working on, but you're not sure what to do at this point. On page 52, Hunley provides a list of four suggestions. I immediately embraced the first and put it to use on two poems I'd been wrestling. Here's the suggestion for revision:

Reread some of your text. Along the way, collect five words or phrases from your text and freewrite on each word. Let the word or phrase take you anywhere. See if any of this new material helps you open up the draft; can you insert the new material at the point you find the original word or phrase? Somewhere else?I found this strategy very helpful in opening up the poem and forcing me into new thinking and material. I then incorporated some of the new stuff into the draft. To the poem's advantage, I think. Then, of course, some cutting was necessary. (I confess to not doing this with all five words or phrases. I revised the suggestion a bit.)

I think you'll also find much in this book to stimulate your own work.