“My sense of a poem – my notion of how you revise – is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.”
–Philip Levine
–Donald Hall
I spent the past weekend on a revision blitz, going through a stack of drafts. The fact that I tend to revise in batches is probably a vestige of the academic calendar. For some reason I find it comforting, and maybe helpful, to devote periods of time to revision, to treat it as its own thing. Which it is.
What I love about revision:
Because revision is the poet’s chance to exercise control, it feels more like a regular activity than the fits and pacing that sometimes go with the writing itself. More like organizing one’s closet or perfecting a recipe: an element of creativity is involved, but it’s also analysis, critical thinking, and trial-and-error.
And it’s not nearly as delicate as composition. I can do it in times and places where the muse would fear to tread. Like at night. Or in the airport. So revision can give solace, too: when, for whatever reason, composition is not happening, I can still revise.
Tricks to facilitate revision:
One of the happiest discoveries of the post-MFA era was that that thing about putting your poem in a drawer and forgetting about it for six months REALLY WORKS. It works because it allows you to do what Philip Levine is talking about in the quote above–you can see what’s there, without remembering what you were trying to do with a particular line or image. Just what’s there, and you can make radical changes that sometimes amount to re-writes.
During the MFA I didn’t really have time to do this. I could will an emotional distance from the poem and everything I wanted it to be. I could embrace the thought of “killing my darlings.” I thought I could be cold-blooded about it, and that being cold-blooded was the point. But a willed emotional distance doesn’t accomplish the perceptual distance that’s required. I couldn’t even see which ones the darlings were. For me, what works is putting the thing away for long enough that I forget.
Questions about revision:
In this interview, Donald Hall mentions a time when spontaneity, generally. was valued over revision. In our craft-centered poetry universe (the verse-iverse?), with the preponderance of workshops, etc., where, if anywhere, does the “first thought, best thought” school of thought persist? Maybe in the experimental modes that value randomness? (Maybe that’s not so much “first thought, best thought” as “no thought, best thought.”)
I wonder, too, how novelists revise, how the length of the project makes the process different from a poet’s process. I’ve seen red-penciled pages, in The Paris Review‘s Writers at Work series, for example. It seems like they’re often on the line or paragraph level, and that they usually accomplish a sharpening of voice or scene or dialog. But this kind of revision seems necessarily more conservative than the kind Hall describes, a kind of revision that is really a re-making of the poem, sometimes in an entirely different form.