from The Circus Animals’ Desertion
William Butler Yeats
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
For many writers, revision has become a bad word. Revision means picking through your words at a painstaking level. Revision means crushing that original inspiration. Revision means not trusting your own work.
Most experienced poets would say nothing is further from the truth. Is the concert pianist who practices six hours a day to prepare for a concert discounting the music, or is she giving her best to perform at her best? Is the homebuilder who checks and rechecks the plans for the foundation and electrical work doubting the work or ensuring quality and pride? Yet for years, while taking and teaching workshops, I’ve run across the attitude that poems are somehow exempt from revision because they issue from the soul.
I would argue that revision is the highest form of respect and soul-nurturing you can give to your poetry. Birthing a child is one thing; molding him or her into a thing of beauty is something more. And, of course, never forget that a draft is just a draft. No one is telling you to throw away what you started with.
Throughout this book, I’ve been guiding you through some strategies to make your poems inviting to your readers. Some of these steps involve revising, deleting, and adding. Now we will take the process even further with some general points to keep in mind while revising poetry.
Peter E. Murphy, poet and founder of the Murphy Writing Seminars, has distilled poetry revision down to five steps that articulate what many of us have been doing for years. While there is no formula for writing, giving name to these steps helps the poet focus and cover his or her poem from a variety of angles.
Under each of Murphy’s steps and descriptions, I’ll provide an example of how I revised the model poem:
1) Eliminate clichés which are the vermin of imaginative writing. Though they were initially fresh images, clichés have been taken over and made mundane by too frequent usage. They have lost their original authority, power and beauty. They raise their predictable heads (aaah, a cliché!) in the early drafts of even the most experienced writers. Turning a cliché against itself by intentionally using it in an inverted form can revive it. i.e., Time wounds all healing. However, if your writing is merely going to repeat a cliché, cut it out.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,
you bleed rust at the bolts of your neck pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe
curbs like tightrope walkers
and flick shards of asphalt
at cars. The 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
and old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face fades
in the summer fog
In winter, your head barely shines
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, black lake memory,
the wish
to never know.
Yes, I added the image of the tightrope walker while working on imagery, but now that I’ve sat with the poem awhile, I don’t think it’s original. We always seem to “walk a tightrope” when we’re being careful. I’m deleting it in favor of the image itself.
2) Identify all abstract or general nouns and replace them with concrete or specific ones. Words like love, freedom, pain, sadness, anger and other emotions and ideas need to be channeled through the physical imagery of the five senses, Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste (SSSTT). Creating original metaphors is the most difficult part of imaginative writing, not just for beginners, but for those who have been working with words for years. This, however, is what makes writing innovative, distinctive and interesting.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,
you bleed rust at the bolts of your neck pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe
curbs
and flick shards of asphalt
at cars. The 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face fades
in the summer fog.
In winter, your head barely shines
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, a black lake memory,
the wish
to never know.
Sometimes the best way to fix an abstraction is to delete it altogether and let the line stand without it. I already have black lake, which suggests a void without the addition of memory. And shadow shapes, a black lake, creates a more resonant rhyme.
3) Fortify the physical character of the piece by using strong action verbs instead of linking verbs and verbs in the passive voice. Because active verbs and concrete nouns are more visceral, dynamic and persuasive, they reduce the need for modifiers. Avoid overusing the -ing form of verbs because it dilutes and reduces their strength. It is like driving a speedboat without raising the anchor.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,
you bleed rust at the bolts of your neck pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe curbs
and flick shards of asphalt
at cars. The 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face fades
dissolves
in the summer fog.
In winter, your head barely shines
shimmers
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, a black lake,
the wish
to never know.
In this revision, I removed the ing from chomping in order to start the poem with more of a punch. The draft doesn’t have any linking verbs or passive voice, but fades can be changed to dissolves to better capture the image of the nature of fog, and shines can be changed to shimmers to capture a smaller sparkle of metal just peeking through the snow.
4) Cut, compress, and condense! Imagine you must pay your reader a dollar a word to read your prose. Naturally, you’ll want to use few words to say as much as possible. Then, imagine you must pay your reader five dollars a word to read your poetry. Compress, especially when the progress of your writing is impeded by imprecise or indecisive language. Try this. Put a gob of frozen orange juice or lemonade on your tongue. The pure, concentrated slush, without any liquid to dilute its sweet potency, is so pungent it stings. Make your writing like that. Cut everything that can be cut until what’s left penetrates the flesh with its sweet, burning flavor.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
You chomp on your
chain-link kelp,
You bleed rust at the bolts in your neck
pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe curbs
and flick asphalt shards
at cars. The 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face dissolves
in the summer fog.
In winter, your head barely shimmers
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, a black lake,
the wish
to never know.
Just reading the poem aloud with the cuts is enough to explain its newfound energy.
5) Be daring in your writing. Experiment and take chances. Risk-taking adds originality and spontaneity to your writing which leads to imaginative and linguistic breakthroughs. Read a wide variety of contemporary writers so you’ll begin to understand the breadth of modern language and imagination, and become more conscious of many voices. You cannot mature as a writer unless you read widely. If you don’t read, you don’t grow.
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
You chomp chain-link kelp,
bleed rust at the bolts in your neck
pipes.
Kids crawl past holes in your neck
pipes
and flick asphalt shards
at cars. The while 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum skin wounds.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face dissolves
in the summer fog.
In winter, your back head barely shimmers
through snow.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, a black lake,
the wish
to never know.
Finally, then, the fully-revised poem:
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
You bleed rust at the bolts.
Kids crawl past holes in your neck pipes
while 100-degree sun
ignites your aluminum wounds.
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
an old man mutter into his taco,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face dissolves
in summer fog.
In winter, your back barely shimmers
through snow.
I’ve lost your title, town, and sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, a black lake,
the wish
to never know.