by Lauren Camp
Poetry is a sublime art form, but making it takes time. Breathtaking poems generally emerge from a slow, considered approach and a long gestation period.
Writing technical and magazine articles taught me structure, concision, and reporting strategies. Poetry teaches me to analyze the colors of each thought, and to look for ways to sculpt the statement. If every poem came out perfect right away, the experience would feel too clipped. I want the project to take a while, to “marinate” and evolve into language both exquisite and weirdly unexpected.
To ensure your poems get picked out from the editors’ slush pile, take some time to prime your work for publication. Here are nine hands-on, critical techniques to help you assess your poems from different perspectives, and improve your writing.
On his 1959 album Kind of Blue, trumpeter and composer Miles Davis named a composition “So What.” Ask that question of your poem. So what if you have a distinctive voice? So what if there’s melody? Why should others care about your poem?
To create a poem with staying power, you have to be able to answer one tough question: is this worth saying? If you are writing the poem just to share an experience, the poem isn’t done yet. Consider what the experience taught you. Would an audience be interested in that? Most experiences are universal in some way. Give readers an insight that they can connect to their lives.
Think hard about “the.”
“The” means “the one and only.” The ultimate. The whole enchilada. The all and everything of a subject.
Look at every single place you’ve used it. Is this what you’re trying to infer? Did you really sit on “the” park bench? (I can think of a lot of benches—and a lot of parks). Did you really eat “the” banana? The one and only?
You see what I mean. It’s easy to say it and write it, but when you start picking apart what you mean…well, maybe you shouldn’t use “the.” Try substituting “a”—a park bench, a banana, a trip to Peru—or see if the poem works without any articles at all.
Another easy fix is to shorten and tighten verbs. Why are you “going” when you could just “go”—or better yet, “fly” or “trudge”?
Gerunds (“ing” words) are so kind. They whisper over readers with a tinge of apology. They are almost always less effective than a lean verb—one without fat. Be insistent in your writing for a change. Make those verbs muscular. Ask them to really do something, to lift the line. Be more authoritative than you think you can; stop “ing-ing” around.
After you’ve made these changes, re-read your lines in a big, vigorous, and certain voice. How does the poem sound now?
Clearly, you can’t cut all “ing” words all the time. Look for a balance of tensile strength with breathing space.
We all write about ourselves in some way, but sometimes poems are just loaded with… well, us.
How many times do you have to say “I” for your readers to know the poem is happening to you? I bet you could safely eliminate some references to self, and readers would still be clued in. Try it. Take one “I” out, and see if it matters. Take out another. Don’t forget to read out loud to make sure you haven’t lost the flow—or the human quality of the poem.
Remove yourself just enough that you aren’t ever-present, but be careful. If you take yourself completely out, the poem will seem choppy and abstract.
My students step into soft spots all the time. So do I, and you will, too, because you must write first for you, and then, revise for someone else.
Where readers sink is the quicksand of the poem. The weight of messy language pulls them down. Sometimes our writing is thick and circular—especially if we are trying to say too much. Because we often write to figure something out for ourselves, rather than writing what we already know, we may be uncertain how to draw the map of what we’re exploring. What a writer thinks is solid might not always be so to a reader.
How can you avoid these spots? Let the poem sit for a while. The irony of this technique is that the quick answer to finding your soft spots is time. Let the poem exist on your hard drive, unopened, until it becomes a little unfamiliar to you.
When sufficient time has passed, read it. Anything confusing or abstract will now be evident. You’ll see where you’ve taken readers on a side journey, and forgotten to bring them back. Because the poem is again new to you, you’ll know if you’ve complicated its map, and if there is a more direct route.
You want readers to get somewhere specific: your revelation. Take out references that send them to the wrong places.
Be particular in your writing. Give details without drowning your readers in adjectives. Tell us which street, the hour it happened, the type of insect you heard in the air, the color of buttons on his shirt.
Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote that you must “put real things in your poems.” Ask the poem every possible question you can. Is everything defined precisely? One of my students wrote about how, as a young child, she was instructed to put her small, cold hand inside the pocket of her mother’s wool coat as a way for her mother to keep her close on dangerous urban streets. Holding fast to the pocket, the girl felt the nubbly texture. Because she described it, I could also feel the pocket lining, and the sense of security that came with it.
Auguste Rodin advised young sculptors to stop gently picking at the clay and plaster of their sculpture when something wasn’t going well. Instead, he encouraged them to “drop it on the floor and see what it looks like then.”
It’s easy to draw an analogy between this and poetry revising. Both creative acts sometimes require drastic changes to find the form your piece needs. Revision is all about seeing new options, but you might not be able to do this when you’re trying to stay true to your initial intent.
If you are convinced that a poem isn’t working and will never work, you are free to do anything at all to it. Construction workers often relish demolition work. Why not use their approach? Destruction frees the poem of the ghost of its earlier structure. Rather than remedying little parts, rebuild the whole.
Pick a line or phrase that seems strong. Let that chosen line become a new jumping off place, and jump in an unexpected direction.
Of course, if you’re an archivist, and the idea of tossing big parts of the poem gives you hives, by all means, save the gems. (I collect the lines that I still like in a separate document.) But eviscerate them if they don’t serve the poem you’re revising.
Have you ever tried splicing two poems together? In a way, it’s like braiding hair. You pull a line from here and a line from there, again and again, until you have created a more complex structure, woven with new thoughts.
Take those good lines, and plait them into another poem. If they are on the same subject, aha! an easy fit. If not, well… your job as poet becomes more challenging. How to match them together...?
In the mid-1960s, John Lennon wrote lyrics inspired by a news headline about a car accident and other events current at the time. His musical partner Paul McCartney had written a simple ditty about a man heading out late on a bus, and moving into a hazy dream. These were totally separate stories, neither quite complete in itself. Twined together, the lyrics became “A Day in the Life,” on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Lennon said, “I had the bulk of the song and the words, but [Paul] contributed this little lick floating around in his head that he couldn’t use for anything.”
Isn’t that how it is sometimes with a poem; a perfect phrase that needs a new home? Move it to another poem. Encourage it to be a strand in something larger, something with a separate music—maybe even one you didn’t realize could exist. Take it from two lyrical masters; poetry interspersed with poetry can double the emotional impact.
Revision is about taking innumerable steps to write the best possible poem. One technique worth trying is to change the speed of the poem.
If you’re writing about something urgent or disturbing, and you want readers to keep moving through the poem—if, in fact, you believe readers should be nearly breathless when reading, try enjambment. In other words, don’t let your lines end comfortably with commas or periods. Don’t let anyone stop reading. Keep the thought in motion.
Think like a movie director for a thriller. When one of the characters is in danger, you want to design the scene to keep viewers on the edge of their seats, blood racing. How will you do this? Lighting, sound...whatever it takes to keep the suspense constant.
That’s what you’re after as a poet, too. Make your readers keep hurrying ahead to the next line, and the next. This doesn’t mean you can’t use punctuation. Instead, place those punctuation marks in the middle of lines, where periods are significantly less weighty and powerful.
For a different way to speed up, incorporate a full line of monosyllables. You’ll get a ticker-tape effect from the rapid short words, hurtling readers through the line.
What if you want to move more slowly, and let readers revel in your images? Lines that are end-stopped (with periods) allow them to pause deeply. Stanza breaks take this even further—a maximum full stop. A complete resting place.
Switch the stride of your poem. As the writer, you know whether it should meander along or hurtle forth; now make your line decisions fit the mood of the piece, so readers know how to “hear” the poem.
It takes work to get a poem right, but this work can also be a joy. My students call this work “revisioning.” Whatever techniques you employ, don’t be too controlling. Allow spontaneity to guide the work.
LAUREN CAMP is the author of the collection This Business of Wisdom (West End Press), an interdisciplinary artist, and an educator. Her poems have appeared in J Journal, Linebreak, Beloit Poetry Journal, and you are here, among other journals. Her work gets accepted almost as frequently as it gets turned down, which she considers good odds. She has also guest edited special sections for World Literature Today (on international jazz poetry) and for Malpaís Review (on the poetry of Iraq). Lauren blogs about poetry at Which Silk Shirt. On Sundays, she hosts “Audio Saucepan,” a weekly global music and poetry program on Santa Fe Public Radio. www.laurencamp.com