Watch Me Edit

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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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Welcome to my webpage where I’m going to edit a poem online each week. Writing is only one-third the pleasure of poetry, another third is reading others’ work, and the final third is editing. And I love to edit.

The first version of today’s poem is bad. I wrote it by flashlight in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep but I didn’t ignore that voice in my head, tell it to piss off. You do that and it stops speaking to you. Mind you, in this case, I think it was a little sleepy too. But that’s okay.

Good poetry always requires work. Think of a plumber showing up at your house and saying, ‘well, I haven’t actually practised this but I know I’ll get it right first time.’ He won’t. That’s why I edit. The more I practise, the more I learn. That way, I can make more complicated mistakes next time …

First Draft:

In My Bathroom at Night

In my bathroom at night, the sky
is a planetarium dome
within reach, there
outside the windows, city
sky, clouds laid out
for show, the tips of houses
trees ringing the bottom
just like they always
did. My seat, the usual
bedtime throne, made
glorious by indigo and silk
screened greys. You were
right to talk me into
buying this house.

Let’s get down to work. First off, the title sucks. I want to make my readers look up. So I’ve chosen one that evokes Ibsen’s, ‘The sun. The sun’, from the end of his play, Ghosts. I want this image even though it’s a quote from a character, Osvald, who is going mad from syphilis. The allusion for me is of a deep need. How many people will get this reference? Irrelevant. I know it’s there and it adds a rich layer of meaning to the poem. Think of poetry as cryptic crosswords. People love them. All we need is to get poetry into the newspaper every day.

From there on, I deleted filler words, tightened others, changed the ending, and again. Overall, I aimed for phrases that would cause a reader to pause and see the image in a new light.

Final Version:

The Sky. The Sky.

In the bathroom at night
a planetarium lays the city
low, stabs stars high
above the ring of homes
and trees. My seat is the usual
bedtime throne made
glorious by indigo and silk
screened greys smoking
among buildings on the far
horizon, dabs of window light
shining through. All I need
is this wealth spread
out before me, my nightly
celestial feast. There is
no hunger here.

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