You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [52]
• Steal from your own poems. Keep all your drafts, even the failures and half-written drafts. They may provide the material for new poems.
• Revise old drafts only if they retain some interest. Look at them occasionally. You may learn from what went wrong or remained undeveloped, and they may provide the phrases, images, metaphors or sounds for the draft you're currently writing.
Because each draft presents different challenges, each calls for different levels of revision. You can revise to sharpen the focus, alter structure, refine theme, remove weak lines, tighten language, improve images and figures of speech, replace an almost-right word with the exactly right word, any or all of these. Finally, look at the poem as a whole and see that everything works together, everything contributing to the whole. Does the opening line draw the reader in? Does the body have the tension and mystery that surprise and delight? Does the ending make a complete and satisfying experience? There's no set number of drafts a poem must go through. Some take dozens, some a few, some only one, and on rare occasion, a poem does emerge perfect. We'd all prefer the perfect poem every time, but we have a responsibility to the poem: If it doesn't emerge perfect, revise, revise, revise. Revise until it is perfect—the perfect poem, the reward.
PRACTICE SESSION
1. Select a draft that interests you. Read it once, aloud, then put it away. Now begin the draft again, from memory. Don't repeat it exactly; write from your memory of the draft. You'll remember its strongest elements, while its weakest fade from memory. Work with the elements that stay with you.
2. Select several drafts you're having trouble with. Which parts are most successful? Put the successful parts of the several drafts together into one draft. Arrange them however you like. Now give the new draft a completely arbitrary title—something like "Before the End" or "After the End"—to see how it changes the draft's subject and focus. Revise this draft of several parts into a new unified draft.
3. Revise a free-verse draft into a form, or a formal draft into free verse. Add a dream and an exotic word to the new draft.
4. Select a rough draft, one you have not yet revised. Rewrite it as prose, with one sentence per line and blank lines between them. Take scissors and cut each sentence from the others. Place the individual sentences into a hat and draw them out, one by one, as the first sentence, the second, and so on. Logic doesn't matter here. Rewrite the newly ordered sentences as lines of poetry, with more enjambed than end-stopped lines. Now begin a fresh revision.
11
REJECTIONS
& REWARDS
I've been writing poems for more than half my life now. In 1983 I submitted poems to a magazine for the first time. A couple of months later, the mailman brought me an envelope containing my poems and a small printed slip thanking me for my submissions and offering regrets—my first rejection slip. I'd been warned to expect this, but it ruined my day anyway, and the next day, too. The following years brought me more rejection slips, some with handwritten notes. Then in the autumn of 1987, the mailman brought me an envelope with a letter from the editor of a small magazine. He wanted to publish one of my poems. I was ecstatic. The magazine came out, and there was my first published poem. Surely, this was the first of hundreds, thousands, the beginning of a new era. I wrote poems, rewrote and submitted them. The envelopes returned bearing sad tidings, more rejections. It would be three more years before another of my poems appeared in a magazine. Rejection, too, is part of the process. "An editor," William Stafford said, "is a friend who helps keep a writer from publishing what should not be published." Editors save the poet the embarrassment of publishing bad poems. While rejection is disappointing, it's a challenge to write better poems. That's what this odd venture is all about. Publication is recognition,