I remember Mike Blouin, before a reading from his wonderful book of poetry I’m not going to lie to you, telling me that he often constructed poems line by collected line. At the time this made no sense to me. I wrote poems in non-stop spurts. Yes, I would edit them relentlessly, but I always kept within the bounds of the original inspiration.

This became even more true when I started my poem a day at the end of January 2010. When it was time, I would sit, fingers poised, and either let the poem pour out or sometimes push. Hard.

As I’ve said before though, my time with Don Domanski at the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing program was transformative. Don taught me to play with combinations of disparate images as a way to deepen my metaphors, to go beneath the surface of a line. He taught me how to construct a poem.

So when I came home from Banff, I questioned whether I wanted to continue with the poem a day discipline. I loved it. I loved the way it guaranteed that ennui, despair, a bad day or week would never stop my writing.

But it also meant pages of crap in my poetry file. And lots of good poems, but pages of crap. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what I had written. I found it hard to keep up with the editing. I always had to choose what deserved my time. I was pleased that every day I honed some tiny part of my skills, but I didn’t always develop it. Great lines went unnoticed in the midst of dross.

A 10 day severe, untreatable migraine settled the issue for me and I stopped. Though I still miss it, I find myself thinking about poetry and writing it in a different way. I now do more piece work, following Don’s advice to look through the old bad ones and find what was good there, what might speak elsewhere. I now construct at least parts of poems line by line. I find they still come together coherently. And I find I can spend more time on them individually when I’m not being swamped continually with new material.

But I don’t regret my daily poem exercise. I’d recommend it to other beginners. It’s a great way to build up your chops. And who knows, if I get stuck some day, I may go back to it.

So here’s one of my constructed poems. I’ve revealed some of its early evolution in a previous post, Editing by Stages.

Earlier Version:
Round

You can’t draw your knife edge against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
walls with a can of paint. Tracing the outline
of Catharina’s tired rim on the moon, you know
colliding with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud, will break
the sea over your knees, swirl clouds of dust
into a stranger’s face, hold the atoms
in your desk still as you lean a pillow’s
stuffing on a bird’s soft back and turn
a swastika into a star with your pen.

Before I sent it off to Don, I worked a lot more on this poem, going through my Wordplay file and looking back over older poems to see what might spark inspiration. I found lines that spoke to the poem’s ending. Here’s what I came up with. The changes start after ‘swirl clouds of dust into a stranger’s face’, the point at which I knew I’d lost it previously. I wanted to talk about the atoms in a desk surface – I will never forget the class in school when we first learned about the permeability of atomic bonds and how I looked down at my desk and poked it, tried pushing my finger into it, knowing finally what it was made of. And then looking up into the air, where more atoms swirled. Seeing the miracle of connectivity, of clustering, of density. All this was powerfully on my mind as I initially wrote this poem and as I worked my way to its proper ending.

Final Version:

Opening the Door

You can’t draw your knife against
the future, argue with a window
that hasn’t shut, carve fault lines
through a saint’s faint heart or stop
walls with a can of paint. Tracing the outline
of Catharina’s tired rim on the moon, you know
colliding with a galaxy, a leaf, a feud will break
the sea over your knees, swirl clouds of dust
into a stranger’s face, bring the brush strokes of black
and grey that change a street into a scroll. If you trust
the atoms in your desk to hold while you turn
a swastika into a star with your pen, the milkiness
of sky will come. Each day
is a joy I can’t control. Each day carries
its own epithet, a stroller sitting on a porch holding
groceries. Only the stars don’t move
in my lifetime. Only the stars.

Don liked this version. It won me “applause from Halifax”.

ps: Do read Mike’s novel Chase & Haven. You will never be able to forget it. I’m happy to say he has a new book coming out soon too.