Let’s face it, many of us mine our lives for our poetry. It’s what we know best and it’s easy to write about, especially when we’re first starting out. The pits are familiar, the contours known to us by heart. It’s a great place to learn to play with language.

The trick is to find the universal in the personal. I’m not saying I was a fast learner. My Crap Poem file is vastly thicker than my good one, but I did get some keepers out of my early years.

Here’s one of them. Its genesis was getting to know a person who seemed lovely and then … wow. I originally named the poem after her which was a bad idea. It was also a bad idea because, as you can see from the first draft below, the original poem was too obscure.

Person’s Name Was Here

We all come with suitcases trundling
behind us, some stuffed so full, cords
hold them tight, you can see the threads
fraying, how taut they pull. Others
like scared old ladies, carry theirs around
their necks, stray feathers slipping, leaving
a path so they can retrace their steps. Or is it
that for some, their way is so impeded, they knick
every building they pass, a little chink here, a
welt there, it’s not much in the abstract, more art
than hansel and gretel, till it’s you the edge catches.

So the first thing I did was change the title. I chose one to help provide context for the poem’s meaning. And of course, I read the poem aloud, something I always do since it allows me to hear the flow of the language, or in the case above, the cumbersomeness. I questioned what was essential for my meaning in all that description, an exercise I always submit my poems to. You can see below which phrases made the cut. You can also see that I decided to rearrange the opening, starting small (purse-size issues), then moving increasingly larger.

I also changed the perspective in this last version. In the original, I’d made the claim that everyone has baggage, big baggage at that. How to win friends among your readers! It’s not even what I intended. I wanted the poem to be about those who carry serious baggage. We all know a few. We may even recognize ourselves. But it’s better for readers to do that than for me to hit them over the head.

This is where careful questioning of the role of every word in a poem helps. I also do it for sound, but I’ll look at that in a future posting.

So here’s the current final version:

Baggage

Many carry theirs like scared old ladies’ purses,
tight around their necks, holding close.
Others come with suitcases trundling behind,
some barely held shut by fraying cords,
stray issues slipping out to form
a wispy path in the night, the kind
girls with hollow eyes follow. Is yours so big
your way is impeded and you can’t help
but nick every building you pass, a little chink here,
a welt there? It’s not much in the abstract, more art
than Hansel and Gretel, till it’s us your edge catches.

I’m not sure what happened in my late forties, but all of a sudden young people started offering me their seats on the bus. And cashiers gave me seniors’ discounts. Now, in and of themselves, these are wonderful things. But context is everything and I was a bit disconcerted. What was going on?

That question became the subject of today’s poem. Here’s the first version:

What Remains on a Face?

Seats appear at 50 from youth
who don’t surrender easily. What lines
do they read on a face alone
with itself, a face that thinks
it’s shuttered. Night must
seep out, the kind that curls
around ankles and pulls
you down. How to hide then?
How to carry the tinkle of bells
in a green field, the whiteness
of daisies in grass? She doesn’t
know, rearranges her lips blindly.

My first edit was simply about pruning. I liked this poem right off (and when I wrote it, I wasn’t liking much I was writing), but I could see the need for tightening. And a new title. I decided to have a play on words, one that gives an (impossible) observer’s stance. I want the poem to give a sense of the narrator trying to observe herself from the outside, to figure out what others see.

Seen on a Bus

Seats appear at fifty from youth
who don’t surrender. What lines
are read on a face alone with itself,
a face that thinks: shuttered. Night
must slip out, the kind that curls
round ankles and pulls. How to hide
then? How to convey the tinkle of bells
in a field, the whiteness of daisies
against grass? She doesn’t know,
rearranges her lips blindly.

Okay. That was much better. And I was feeling happy. I loved the images of the tinkling of bells in a field, the whiteness of daisies against grass. Every time I read them, they made me happy.

Then I realized I was having a Sound of Music moment. I was channelling my inner Maria. My narrator was 50, for pete’s sake, not an 80 year old Swiss immigrant remembering being a milkmaid in the Alps.

So I cut those images. Yup. They were inappropriate in this poem. My narrator wanted to convey normality, she wanted to look professional.

Here’s the final version. I still like it. Which isn’t to say it won’t get edited again.

Seen on a Bus

Seats appear at fifty from youth
who don’t surrender. What lines
are read on a face alone with itself,
a face that thinks: shuttered. Night
must slip out, the kind that curls
round ankles and pulls. How to hide
then? How to convey the tidiness
of a desk, the neatness of files
against wood? She doesn’t know,
rearranges her lips blindly.

I write a poem a day no matter where I am, even if I’m on a plane over the Pacific Ocean, the origin of this poem. My one rule is to write down the first thing that comes into my head, though in this case my imagination was not my best friend. But I followed my golden rule where it led and out came a bad poem.

But bad poems can often be rescued. I liked the bones of this one, so over the next few weeks I returned to it, paring it down until I felt a clear voice was emerging.

Let’s look at the initial draft:

Plane Crash

First the crack at the back
the ripping of metal flesh
frantic announcements jumbled
with the orange fall of masks.
Air whistling past our ears
and the sound of a lone voice
gasping Abide with me as the plane
hurtles down, dark heads bent
over knees, hands gripping seat
backs until the hit, water’s great
flattening, the smoothing
of angry waves into quiet circles
a stone’s toss would make. We float
in pieces boats will search for.

Clichés are the first things in my poems to be cut. Abide with me may be my favourite hymn but, in this context, it’s a cliché I quickly ditched. I also didn’t like the phrases that sounded too much as if they came out of the plane’s safety features pamphlet, so ‘heads bent over knees, hands gripping seat backs’ were the next to be examined. I kept ‘dark heads’, separating the words by a line break to give the reader a sense of the darkness inside the plane. Then I added the word ‘fear’, which ideally you don’t want to name in a poem, since imagery should carry emotion to the reader. But I wanted to convey that sense of people turned into a pure emotion, one we can all relate to. And I didn’t want to do it with words. So I used fear as a shortcut.

After doing all this, I went to work deleting extraneous words and changing line breaks to build drama.

Here’s the next version:

Plane Crash

First the crack at the back
the ripping of metal flesh, frantic
announcements jumbled
with the orange fall of masks.
Air whistles past our ears
as the plane hurtles down, dark
heads bent over knees, fear
texting home, gripping seat backs
until
the hit, water’s great
flattening, the smoothing
of angry waves into quiet circles
a stone’s toss would make. We float
in pieces boats will search for.

Since I started writing this post, I’ve edited the poem eight more times, moving the line ‘air whistles past our ears’ to after ‘dark heads bent over’ and then deleting the ‘dark heads’ phrase entirely. I got rid of the melodrama of having ‘until’ on its own line. And while picturing the movement in the poem (always a useful exercise), I realized I’d better have the water ripple before it flattens. Also, I changed the title. It’s still not great (too close to cliché for my taste) but, for some bizarre reason, title-writing is not one of my gifts. If a good one doesn’t appear fully-formed, I’m struggling.

Then I went to work on the line endings again. I want this poem to create its own momentum, to pull the reader forward and down ‘until’ (which I worked to get on an end) the plane hits, when time slows, shown by the endings: ‘flattening’, ‘circles’, ‘float’.

Here’s the current final version. It’s not a long poem. It’s not a great poem. But it is a good one for me to practise my editing skills on. I expect it to undergo more drafts, so it may appear here again.

Crash Landing

First the crack at the back,
the ripping of metal flesh, frantic
words jumbled with the orange fall
of masks. Plane streaming down, air
whistling past ears as fear
texts home, grips seat backs until
we hit, water’s great rippling flattening,
smoothing into quiet circles
a stone’s toss would make. We float
in pieces boats will search for.