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.
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