It has been tough to write this post, to find a poem I’m willing to give away, since I’m realizing more and more that I can’t send poems out to contests or journals once I’ve posted them here.

This is serious, though admittedly not from an income perspective. I don’t earn much from publishing. My three forthcoming poems in Descant will net me $100 and I can’t bear to think of the hourly wage that comes to. Let’s just say poets are grossly underpaid. If you’re reading this blog (and 300 of you are each month, spending an average of 10 minutes per visit, do feel free to leave more comments) hoping to figure out how to become rich from your poetry, you might want to quit now. You either write because you have to, because that voice in your head is more insistent than the lure of old Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, or you pack it in and become an insurance agent.

So why is it serious? Because submitting to journals is an important form of peer review. If everything you send out is constantly rejected, then you have to keep working and working at learning your craft and fiercely editing your work. Rejection letters are as important as acceptances. Plus getting published in literary journals – and winning contests if you can – is an important stage in getting a book published.

But learning how to edit is why I’m here, even though I only produce, if I’m lucky, one to three good poems a week out of the seven I write. When I was first starting out, I wanted to know how others edited their own work. Yes, there are places on the web that will tell you the mechanics of editing. But I wanted to watch someone do it. So I’m writing the kind of blog I wanted to read.

Another reason it’s been tough to write this post is that I’m editing so differently now, it’s been hard to find a poem with enough stages documented to be able to show what I’ve done. Not because I’m not editing my work as carefully as I used to. On the contrary: I’m more self-critical than I was before. This blog has been good for me. There is nothing like knowing 300 people are watching to make me hone even more carefully.

The difference is, I now start editing in my head. I no longer even allow myself to put down on paper what I first hear. Instead, my new internal crap editor does the initial round with a coarse grain of sandpaper. It’s taken me a long time to make that an unconscious habit and it doesn’t catch everything but it sure helps. Also, my new style of writing means I’m often polishing fragments before I start piecing a poem together. I now have a Wordplay file where I work on lines a few at a time until I see how they fit. My drafts file is therefore not holding raw drafts anymore.

So this post is of necessity about how the editing process has changed for me as I’ve started to mature as a poet. I’ll show you some of the stages the following poem went through, but I can’t even begin to do it in the order it happened, nor can I start you at the very beginning. All I can do is give some of the pieces and how they evolved.

So here’s the written version of the original fragment that came to me because yes, it was snowing and damn, it was March, and still, Japan was so much on my mind:

the spring of birds chirping under cherry blossoms of late snow, the window a place
your eyes won’t go to, refusing the branches lined with new cushions
of white, the heavy greyness of sky’s weight
the snow a thick cloud the world lives in again, a dream of cherry
blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters tossed up

Now I knew, even as I typed, I was using ‘cherry blossoms’ twice but at that point, I just wanted to get the words out, so I silenced my internal editor, telling it I would choose later which line would keep the words.

At the same time, I’d also been playing with the following fragments:

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting metal’s rub across canal’s water

It’s quiet out when you wake, car wheels moving over the spaces
crystals leave as they fall

I decided to try putting them together:

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting commuting’s whine away
from your pillow. When you listen, you hear
the spring of birds chirping under cherry blossoms of late snow, the window a place
your eyes won’t go to, refusing the branches lined with new cushions
of white, the heavy greyness of sky’s weight
the snow a thick cloud the world lives in again, a dream of cherry
blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters tossed up

trusting that the ending would follow. The only fragment I had to help me was this one:

complaining about the injustice of the earth, the injustice
of birth, that arbitrary push through womb’s mouth into
a random land, a lottery of milk and honey or
nettles, green disguising a hidden tussle, a struggle under
the mud, below rock’s seeming stateliness, below
water’s doily edge. Some are born trusting each
day’s sun, hearing a scattering of chirps and caws as
bread comes

which wasn’t good but at least showed me the direction I could go in. It also shows just how much slicing and dicing can be needed in one passage, how much serious rewriting sometimes has to take place. ‘Injustice’ is an abstraction which meant it had to go. I realized I could say the same thing by keeping the word ‘lottery’ and adding ‘lucky’ before it. ‘Milk and honey’ is a cliché and I needed to shake it up if I wanted to keep the sense of it in the poem. And well, much of the rest just got cut. I trust my ear to tell me when something is bad. For example, I knew what I meant by ‘rock’s seeming stateliness’ (which is truly dreadful) but decided to replace it with what could be trusted instead, even allowing myself to use two forms of that word.

Here’s the current version of the poem. Let me know what you think.

On Not Looking Outside

It’s quiet out when you wake, traffic suspended by the curtain’s white
fall, the wind drifting commuting’s whine away
from your pillow. When you listen, you hear
the spring of birds chirping under petals of late
snow, the window a place your eyes won’t go to, refusing
the branches lined with fresh cushions of white, the heavy
greyness of sky’s weight, the thick cloud the world lives in
again, a dream of cherry blossoms on a wrecked island, the trees splinters
tossed on a bed of house fragments. You’re still waiting
for green, the green you were born to, the lucky lottery
of birth in a land of milk and stable earth, the smell of mouldering
leaves, tiny shoots pushing the purple of crocuses under
a trustworthy sun. You won’t look out until the world
lies down again, until your feet can take
the sidewalk’s dry concrete for granted. Some people are born
trusting each day’s sun, hearing a scattering of chirps and caws
as bread comes. You weren’t one of them.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I have edited this blog post several times too. That doesn’t mean I’ve got all the mistakes out. Just that I’ve worked at it.

Well, I climbed my writer’s block and discovered the other side was a slide. All it took in the end was the usual combination of boredom, courage, and discipline. The first might sound odd, but really, you can only play so many games, watch so many old tv shows on your computer, before it starts to get stale. And I missed writing, like a phantom limb. I knew it had to be there, even if I couldn’t feel it with my fingers. So I went back to the root of the disease, faced it squarely, and have started writing a poem a day again.

Yes, that’s right. It was a big mistake for me to ever stop. I need that daily discipline the same way I need breakfast. I’m not saying the time away wasn’t fruitful. I started writing poetry in a different way, thinking about it as a combination of single thoughts slowly coming together, instead of as a single flash of glorious inspiration. While I worked at hearing poetry all the time before, it is now a more deliberate process. I realize individual fragments have a much greater purpose and deserve more attention than I previously gave.

Let’s go back to that phrase ‘hearing poetry’. By that, I don’t just mean listening to others read, or reading others’ work. I mean listening to the poetry my mind speaks out of everything I see, if I’m willing to pay attention. That attention becomes valuable when later, in a poem, I need to place my narrator in a real setting. Phrases as simple as the descriptors (‘the lavender sky, the twilight quiet’) from last week’s poem were ones I heard as I raised my head from reading on the sofa and looked out my own window.

This hearing is the result of an exercise I used to work at consciously, when I practiced metaphors, making up non-traditional, non-clichéd descriptions for people, trees, etc. (see this post for my examples back then. And to see how much I’ve improved. I hope.). After years of hard work, it’s become habitual now, to invert familiar images, to play with them almost without thinking. I hear them in my head: ‘Your face, the colour of a migraine’, ‘I think of the birch which always carry snow on their arms’.

So that reminder of the benefits of hard work has sent me back to a poem a day. I’m writing them differently now though. I don’t just sit down at one point and blurt out a single thought. Instead, I’ll write notes to myself all day, gather the accumulation of weeks and months, pilfer older unsuccessful poems to pull together a complexity of thoughts. This is how I plan to continue improving as a poet.

So today’s poem began with this fragment, written as we drove home the other night under the brightest Supermoon for nearly two decades:

the moon loses its glory over the city, sucked
into a fretwork of cables and chimneys,
voices the fleeting sparks of power through
the street-light bright night.

As I wrote it, I was remembering another moon poem I had written back in my undergrad
years, when I was planning on being a professional musician. It never occurred to me then to take poetry seriously. I don’t think it even occurred to me that other people wrote poetry too, other than what I’d had to read in high school. It was simply something I did late at night, sitting outside on the porch stairs. Here’s what I wrote then:

Stepping across the sand
to the white path
you have spread
over the waters:
Moon, I would travel towards you,
but my feet sink at every step
and I am afraid.

Other fragments and lines came together and after some serious editing, this is the result. I have found that every poem I have written this last week has contained some reference to Japan. Their suffering inhabits my fingers.

Moon

The moon is bigger tonight, a saved-up twenty year
shine, more a check-up on the planet’s marbled
health, a gleam over an expanding desert, a tighter purse
of those cratered lips at an island’s moved
mayhem, the missing houses and tankers, the timbers toothpicked
over valleys wide. As I watch, this moment’s
interrupted by embankment’s darkness, a road’s simple
curve, the orange ball rising higher for
its better look. But it pales, losing glory over
the city’s fretwork of cables and chimneys,
voices the fleeting sparks of static through
the street-bright night. Distance shrinks it to
a child’s toy ball, a bedtime book, a tea
cozy placed on a table between
the chatter of friends. Only the waves
keep its magnificence, only the waves spread
the white path. Moon, I would travel
toward you but my feet sink
at every step and I am afraid.

I’m slow with posting this week’s poem as I’m suffering from jetlag after a long, involved trip home from a wonderful holiday visiting friends in Ghana. While there, I had to post early as internet access was erratic. The only constant was the steamy heat and the friendly people dressed in bright colours. To my intense pleasure, we were able to visit a meteorite crater but so far, the poem fragments I wrote that day have yet to be pulled together. Same with my poem on Ghana itself.

Instead, let’s look at an older poem:

First Draft:

The wind wants to weft to our skin,
reach our blood, wants us to know
we could be clouds in a moving
sky pushing through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. Wants to tell us we could
see lakes ruffle under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
as they pray. We could
moan when we reach
a mountain we can’t
climb, blow travellers off
a pass they’re determined
to cross. We could
have power over walls
if they didn’t block us on three sad
sides. Only one face
will let us speak. And even there
they insulate against our voice.

I wrote this draft while at the Banff Centre, looking out my window at clouds scudding across mountain tops. I had the door open an inch so I could hear the frozen wind’s call, feel it stripping the fibres out of my sweater and scarf. It was a pretty fast write (i.e., type) and as you can see from the final version below, most of the important images came out in this first flush.

I started rewriting it almost immediately. Here’s the next draft:

All afternoon, I listened to the wind
it’s conversation louder
than usual. It told me it wants
to cleave to our skin, replacing blood until
we’re clouds in a moving
sky pushing our way through trees, pushing
birds across imaginary
boundaries. It wants us to know
we could ruffle lakes under
our fingers, type words
in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And if
we reach a mountain we can’t
climb, we can moan, blow
travellers off a pass they’re determined
to cross. We’d have power over walls,
the ones that face us, not
the three sad sides blocked from hearing
our voice. And when it’s dark,
we can sing a thousand children
to sleep, the sad ones listening
for steps they do not
want. We can rock them
in our arms.

By this point, the poem was starting to take a darker tone, sparked by the image of ‘three sad sides’ blocking the wind’s voice. Though I guess it was fairly dark to propose pushing travellers off a mountainside, especially given that I was getting to know some very nice writer/climbers. I changed that because, through multiple drafts, this became a poem about compassion, the wind’s and the listener’s.

I separated out the two parts of the poem into stanzas (I have been teased in the past about only ever writing one stanza poems but I do use more on occasion, see Glenn?). The first one remains about nature and the travellers are the link to the human side of the second stanza.

Hearing the Wind’s Generous Offer

All afternoon, you listened to the wind, its voice
louder than your blood. It told you it wants
to replace skin, hollow bone until you’re in cloud,
sky moving, pushing your way through trees,
pushing birds across imaginary boundaries. It wants
you to know how to ruffle lakes under
your fingers, type words in snow for owls to speak
when they pray. And when you come moaning
to the mountains, to hide passes behind
your skirt as travellers try to cross.

At night, you can howl for a thousand children,
the ones who listen for steps they do not
want. You can hammer walls, the ones
facing out, not the sad sides blocked
from hearing your voice. Shake
the studs you watched nails
enter, slip through cracks you widened
with your teeth. And then, touching
hair, do nothing but dry the tracks
salt leaves on a cheek, offering
a thought of stars caught
between the darkness of clouds, a brief glimpse
of space they can believe in.