Responding to a Rewrite Request

Image © Lori Gravley

I’m always rewriting my work—from small edits to larger revisions.  For me, this is where my work as a writer begins to feel like work: learning to see my poem as it is on the page and responding to it in ways that make the poem better.

Just reading that last sentence makes me shiver.  I realize that I’m surrounded, psychologically speaking, by my projections.  My husband very rarely comes into focus for me as himself, he’s often seen by me as who I think he is, the same for my children and my friends.  I’m working on this.  Yoga and meditation help.  Compassionate Communication helps. Getting older and becoming more aware helps. 

In revising my writing, the helps are the same.  Being patient, sitting with what is, being aware of common patterns, and running my ideas through wise guides help me see my work as it is and not how I expect it to be.

So does the list of revision thoughts I’ve compiled from feedback I’ve gotten through the years.

What’s making me think of this now when I'm immersed in planning my next novel is the feedback I just got from an editor.  He asked me to remove the I-ness from a poem.  My first response was, of course, the nerve.  But I slept on it and woke this morning to give it a try.  It was easy to remove the I and the new poem was a better poem.  I’ve added *examine the I-ness* to my list of revision strategies, it joins other useful tactics that I frequently apply when I revise my poems:

--inspect the articles and conjunctions,

--kill your darlings (find the poetic word or vocab word that sticks out in the poem and delete it),

--look for the form (is it organic or is it leaning toward a sonnet, a ghazal, couplets?)

--break the line, space the line,

--write to the turn (find the turn in the poem and then pay attention to what leads up to that turn and what happens after it),

--explore cutting the first and last lines,
and now --examine the I-ness.

Update: The advice he gave must have worked.  My poem, "Late Summer Song," will be published online at the beautiful e-zine Plum Tree Tavern. 

Poem a Day--Drawing Down the Muse

Not a contest winner, but one of my favorite

photos from Cairo, Egypt.  It's the hallway

to an 11th centruy mosque, built so that 

they'd hear any invaders and have time 

to rise from prayer and pick up their weapons.

I taught writing for a long time.  Now that writing is my full time job, I find that living with a writing teacher (me) is a pretty sweet aid.  Comments from friends make it clear to me that not everyone has their own little writing assignment generator living in the same house with them.  But I do.  So I thought I would share some of the recent writing assignments I’ve given myself.

1.  Find a photo contest and study the winners.  I did this with Kolga Tbilisi and Sony photo competitions, but you could do this with any of the big competitions.  Sit down, browse through the images, and when one of them speaks to you, sit with it a little longer.  Then enter into it.  Become a person or a thing already pictured or step into the photograph and experience it from the inside.  Write from the POV of the photographer.  Write about an object.  Imagine the interior life.  Make a list of words from the photograph: nouns, verbs, adjectives.  Write with those.  Use your senses in the photograph. What would it smell like, taste like, feel like?  What’s beyond the frame.  What will happen next. 

I spent nearly two months last year writing every few days from the amazing photos I found on photo contest sites.  In most cases, I didn’t even reference the photograph, just used it to open me up to new images and words.

2.  Write from a news story far away.  Take yourself out of your daily world.  Read BBC and Aljazeera and then make the big story more personal.  Where does that story intersect with your life? 

Here’s the beginning of a poem I wrote recently about a news story I heard on the BBC. 

While we stuff turkey

and sew shut the space

between its thighs

so that the bread and sage

will stay and sweeten flesh

men in Macedonia, at the edges

of the life they fled

and the lives they hoped for,

sew each other’s lips closed

with nylon string.

So much of what we hear in the news moves us because we can see those same impulses, those same actions, those same desires in our own lives.  Take some time and explore those connections.

3.  I talked about this practice in the last post, but it’s worth mentioning here.  Read an earlier poem and chose a word from that poem.  Write that word as the title at the top of a new page.  Then, write a poem using the same form of the earlier poem that earns the title you gave it.  Same general line lengths, same stanza structure, same length.  Let your mind float free in association to the word, but keep it reigned in with an external structure.