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.
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