CHAPTER NINE

The Difficult Simplicity of Short Poems and Killing Darlings

“The secret of boring people is to tell them everything.” - Anton Checkhov

I have lots to say about revision, because I’ve spent most of my writing life as a revisionist rather than a writer. I suffered–sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, from workshop demons. Even while writing this paragraph, I have cut more than contributed at my final stage of revision. If something I share is useful, great, if not, no worries. You will find a revision process that works for you. However, listen to EVERYTHING a short poem has to tell you. I have learned the most about revision and what makes a poem (of any length) great from shorter poems, which is why I’m covering them in a chapter on revision. Just take a look at these two masterclasses.

“The Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin
“Sonoma Fire” by Jane Hirshfield

The Short Poem as Teacher

With notably less space on the page, a short poem has fewer tools (words) with which to make meaning. This economy of words necessitates a sparse precision. A short poem has to know what it's saying and has to do so in a compact space. A short poem’s final form (the product) is like revising (the process). When I revise a poem, especially if it really needs a lot of work, often the first thing I have to figure out is what the poem is trying to say. When you read a great short poem (see above ❤️) it is like the poem was born knowing what it needed and wanted to say, but this is not the case. A short poem likely got there through stringent revision, perhaps even more so than longer poems.

In the first chapter’s exercise, I referenced attending a writing weekend with Jane Hirshfiled, titled, “Writing Poems With a Generous Heart Facing in Ten Directions.” In one of her talks, Hirshfield often spoke of poetry the same way she did of mindfulness and Buddhism. She said things like, “The practice [poetry or mindfulness or Buddhism] is just as much about catching yourself off track and getting on the track.” In her smiling voice, she quietly added, “Poetry is the act of attention.” A poem as the act of attention has become a mantra for me, both as an editor and as a writer. The act of reading a poem is attention. No matter how long or short the poem is, it should hold your attention. In my experience, short poems interest you, then destroy you with their accuracy, because the poet was paying attention. There is nothing that does not need to be there.

Below are two shorter poems that appeared in the NAR. The first is a form poem, and the second is devastatingly wonderful. Please read them several times. In the first read, check for comprehension, and in the second look for understanding, and the third dissect how the poet did it.

Apprenticeship by Adam Vines

He butters up the corners, base

And fishtails, tamps the brick in place,

Then rasps the trowel across the joint.

He butters up the corners, base

Then slides the chock and plumb line up.

“Boy, scrape my mudboard, keep it wet.”

He butters up the corners, base

And fishtails, tamps the bricks in place.

This short poem is a triolet, an eight line form where certain lines are repeated, so only three lines in this form are original from the others. The repetition mimics the difficult act of laying brick and being an apprenticeship with much to learn. Forms, particularly short forms like the triolet, haiku, and tanka are great exercises for concision.

He Said Yes by Catherine Pritchard Childress

He called it our marital bed, declared it time to return;

leave our daughter’s twin–my retreat since he’d said yes.

Did you kiss her? Yes. More? Yes. Everything.

In three lines, this speaker learns of a betrayal in their marriage. Notice the expectations you have after reading the title, and how they are subverted with each line, but particularly the last line. In three lines, the reader learns of the affair, has their expectations change, and is left at the speaker’s flashback to the confirmation about the affair. What a journey through time and the heart in three lines!

Other short poems to study are haiku and tanka. In particular, these books are great to have in your collection.

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa by Robert Hass
Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary by Harriet Mullen

Revision is Re-vision

The act of revision is right here in the word, revision is re-vision–a reseeing of the poem, both for its failures and possibilities. Revision is not editing. Editing is checking work for grammar, punctionion, and clarity. Revision is going back to an origin and testing it again, taking risks, pinching off the deadheads, putting out suckers in a new direction.

Revision is brave work. Revision means being open to the opinions of others, as well as taking risks and allowing a poem to take a final form that you initially did not intend or even see as a possibility. It can mean cutting out work you labored to bring to the page. Below is an eleven line poem we published in the NAR.

Rib by Hope Wabuke

between his stomach

and his heart

that place

taken from

other animals

and eaten

with barbecue

and applesauce

licked clean

and then thrown

to the dog

Would you believe that this poem was originally four pages? The May/June 2022 issue of Poets & Writers ran a feature on Hope Wabuke, who had this to say about the revision process of not only the poem above, but how working with an NAR editor shifted her understanding of revision in general:

While working on The Body Family for the past ten years, Wabuke says literary journal editors have often allowed her to “see more clearly the center of a poem or themes running through the poems.” When she sent a “sprawling four-page narrative poem” to the North American Review, for example, editor J. D. Schraffenberger replied that he saw a complete eleven-line poem within the sprawl. Wabuke happily agreed, and the print journal published the edited poem, “Rib,” in 2015. Wabuke says it changed how she thinks as a poet, teacher, and editor: “It was a pivotal learning experience about scope and resonance and finding the crystalline center of a poem.

When Wabuke talks of “finding the crystalline center of a poem,” she’s speaking about finding a poem’s guts, what it really is. Some people call this “the heart of a poem,” or the “poem’s center.” However you think of it, know that it’s the essential part that belongs on the page and your revision should serve what the poem wants, which is not always aligned with what you wanted, at least when you first wrote the poem.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a famous revisor, revising “Song of Myself” many times before his death. As part of the NAR’s series Every Atom, a commemoration of Whitman 200 years after his birth, I wrote about seeing part of Whitman’s manuscript at the Huntington Library. I hovered over the case, trying to imagine his journey of changing thoughts. On the page, a line read, “And to me each acre of the earth and sea”, and in much darker and bolder ink, he’s crossed out “earth” and written “land” above it. The difference between those two words might not seem like much at first glance, but they are incredible differences. When I show my students an image of this page and ask them the difference between “earth” and “land,” and how the implications of each word changes the line, they talk about: dirt, farming, grandfathers, ownership, boundaries, outer space, planets, water, ocean, the sea. When we hear “earth” we likely picture our blue and green planet hanging in the dark of space, but this image wasn’t even available to Whitman who died fifty-four years before the first picture of earth from outer space. Language evolves, and words expand and collapse to describe our understanding. If you’ve never paused at the Oxford English Dictionary in a library, it’s worth a trip to look up a word whose history you’re curious about. The OED will tell you the word’s language origin, when it came into use in the English language, provide examples, and note major changes in the word’s meaning or usage. An OED will point out that even languages revise themselves.

Apocryphal stories of poets lamenting over whether or not to place a comma at the end of a line are commonplace. That’s not the scope of this text, but let’s go somewhat micro-revision and take a look at wording within lines. Go to grammar and consider the action and agency in your sentences and lines of poetry, meaning what or who is the agent in the line and whether or not they are doing the action, being acted upon, or some force outside the poem is doing the action. Take a simple sentence, “Brad throws the ball.” Brad is the agent, the who or what (noun) and he is, indeed, doing the action, throwing the ball. One of the marvels of poetry is its viny syntax. Let’s look at Babineau's poem “The Brush” from the previous chapter. Below is the first stanza. As you read it, think about agency and action.

Before my dad installed wood floors,

my mother’s room

had carpet, dark brown threads

that gave way to

my toes, curling themselves in soft plush

as she pulled and pulled at my hair, straightening it all

The dad did one thing, installed wood floors, but that was before the tangle or carpet and hair, which is the real crux of the poem. The dad has less to do in the poem than the mother and daughter, so what does placing him in the starting position of the poem do? What if the poem opened this way?

My mother’s room

before my dad installed wood floors,

had carpet, dark brown threads

My toes curled themselves in soft plush

before my dad installed wood floors

Each rearrangement of the opening changes the meaning, as well as the agent and action. All this is to say, don’t accept each sentence, phrase, or clause as received and final. Move the words around and play, which will be a challenge to most native English speakers, whose sentence structure is dependent on syntax or word order, but do it. The order you received the words and images as a writer is not necessarily their final order on the page. A poet has many tools in their favor: line breaks, not using punctuation, a poem’s natural dichotomy of meaning. Remember that in poetry most words or doing at least two or more things at once. Let the word order sound a little strange, and just experiment as the words find their way.

Many students new to workshop are leary of revision, and rightly so, because anyone who has written much knows how much wrestling it took to put the best words in the best order on the page. If you make a cut, you’re cutting work, and not just work, but likely something that is personal and precious to you. If you are a writer who finds revision difficult, here are a few things you can try.

Write the poem and then cold case it. Put it away and don’t think about it. For a minimum of two weeks, leave it alone. There really is no maximum to this. I’ve heard of poets finding drafts from years ago, drafts they have even forgotten they wrote. When you’re ready to revise, do so. I often revise with my notebook out, where I’ve recorded interesting words and phrases. Often, I’ve looked up these words in the OED, which allows me to think about them differently.
Tell yourself revising poems like trying on clothes. Take all your ideas back to the dressing room, and no one has to see. Try them all on, even the crazy ones. Move the last line up to the first line. Take a sharp left turn early in the poem. See if the poem fits into a form, like a sestina or vinelle. No one has to know, but you.
Keep records, which will differ if you are a paper or digital drafter. I am mainly a digital drafter, so if I’m hesitant about completely deleting a previous draft, I add “VER X” at the end of the file extension. “VER” stands for “version” and “X” stands for the number of times I’ve revised a poem. At AWP, I once asked a car full of poets what the most times they’ve ever revised a poem was. No one answered hence, the infamous Paul Valery quote, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

A Note on Workshop

"Art lives upon discussion," writes Henry James, (1843-1916) "upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints…” To a great extent, James is describing what a workshop is and what it does. Before workshops were housed in academic institutions, fellow writers shared their work with each other, famously the working and editing relationship between Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Likely, you’re reading this because you’re in a college class, where you will be turning in your work and your classmates will workshop it, during which, you will sit silently while they discuss the merits and demerits of your piece. Each teacher leads workshop a bit differently, but this is the historical model they have inherited for better or worse. It’s worth noting that other models of workshop are emerging, albeit, slowly. Of course, bad stories about workshops abound, and they can be brutal. Blame is placed on the other writers in the room and the tone set by the teacher. I’ll leave these workshop stories to the rumormill of the internet. Our work here is to discuss workshops that promote work. At its best, a workshop is a community that values risk, honesty, and curiosity. I recall one of my graduate workshop teachers telling us to “check our egos at the door,” which is good advice. Ideally, a workshop is not about people–that is the person who wrote the piece or the person offering critique. A workshop is about the work on the page. Period.

One of the best, although dated texts, I’ve read about workshop is Phil Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, which recounts some of the earlier days of the Writers’ Workshop, when Levine was a student of John Berryman after studying with Robert Lowell. Levine recounts the early days of the Iowa Workshop and his stellar classmates: W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, and Henri Coulette. Levine offers the reminder that the reward of writing a good poem is writing a good poem, not workshop.

During my undergraduate workshop, which I discussed earlier, we read poems by other poets: James Wright, Louise Gluck, William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Horace, Keats, Tomaz Salaman, for the first half of our three hour class. This frustrated some students who wanted our class to consist only of our poems. Rick’s nonverbal message remained vital: to learn to write poems, you have to learn to read poems. He brought in finer examples of our meager aspirations. If a student wrote an elegy, Rick presented Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Larry Levis’s “Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope.” He was teaching us to write, by teaching us to read. The students paying attention learned more from these poems than from our naive attempts.

I’m still in touch with writers from Rick’s workshop, and a few are still my first readers, with whom I share early drafts of work. The students in your workshop class will offer you feedback, but it’s also important that you form lasting relationships with writers whose work you admire and trust. A workshop is a community, not a class.

You wear two hats in workshop: the poet and the critic. If you are the poet, your work is being discussed. Take what you hear with a grain of salt. Some of the feedback will be valuable to you and some of it will not. Also, how you understand the feedback will change over time. You are not the same poet at the end of the day that you were at the start of the day. If you are the critic, your job is the gift of attention toward another’s work. Take the role seriously. Tell the poet what the poem does well and places where you wanted the poem to do more of confused you. Read the poem in the tradition it is following or breaking. Be earnest. Be engaged.

Exercise 1: Kill Your Darlings

First, remember this is only an exercise, It’s play, there is no permanent delete, so be brave and have fun. Dust off a piece you’ve written within six months to two weeks ago. It’s important that the piece is “cold” and the attachments are fading, so that you can make the necessary incisions and excisions. Maybe you can work with a piece that has been through workshop. Pick an image, a clause, a few lines, maybe just a combination of alliterative words that hold your interest. Cut the rest, for now, or forever, TBD. Don’t worry about that now. Instead, use one of these tactics below and add in one or two of the concepts we’ve covered:

let the words invite their kith and kin
include a line or part of a line from a poem you admire
use alliteration or assonance based on these words
try writing the opposite of that you first said
experiment with line breaks that aren’t typical for you
pick a title that feels different from your normal titling convention
include three of the five senses

Exercise 2: Write an Erasure Poem

Deciding what to leave out of a poem is a good exercise to practice when thinking about revision. An erasure poem is a poem you write when you leave out (erase) or blackout words, phrases, and or sentences from an existing text. Essentially, you are creating a new text from an old one. Students have written erasure poems from junk mail, pages of novels, letters, old diaries, instruction manuals.

Recently, the poet Kate Baer has soared to fame for erasure poems she creates from people messaging her on social media with criticism about feminism, her work, motherhood, and body shaming her. She posts much of her process on Instagram. She’s made the New York Times bestseller list three times, so no matter what you think of her work, her poetry is intersecting with politics and culture.

Find source material and write an erasure poem.

Exercise 3: Revise a Published Poem

Recall what Paul Valery said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Whether or not this is true, is up to the poet and their particular poem in question, but the premise serves as a useful exercise. Below is a poem that we published and it captivated me when I first read it in Submittable, perhaps because of its assertiveness and experimentation with time, the unexpected, yet effective stanza break. I love how the poem covers so much time. Revise this poem anyway you see fit. Here are some ideas to get you started.

revise the poem so it is one sentence
write the poem from the a wasp’s point of view
write the poem in the present only, no past recollections
have the speaker admit something
turn this poem into a tanka

The Wasps by Jason Tandon

Eleven years they have returned to nest in the hollow doors

of our gray plastic storage shed. Just now I saw one enter

on this warm May morning and remembered

how I used to kill them

with cans of chemical spray.

It took years

before I learned

to stand still,

let them zip around my ears

till they flew off

for an hour or so

as if I were

a prospective buyer

touring an open house.

Poetry