I started thinking about the differences between editing and revision when I read some interviews with other poets.
I revise extensively and have never written a first draft that I left as is. A short poem might go through 30 or 40 versions. I revise toward clarity and away from difficulty, wanting the poem to appear to be written with ease. ~Ted Kooser
I realized two things from the Kooser quote:
1. I don't count how many versions of a poem I write, but I feel like it is fewer than 30, and
2. I have no clue what is a guy like Kooser doing when he revises a poem 30 or 40 times. If you are not familiar with Kooser's work it tends to be short.
You have probably heard folk use the cliché illustration of some effort resembling someone rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and that is what I feel when I revise several times. Am I making a difference with my work, or am I just moving lines and words around in a futile effort to keep the ship from sinking?
Well, I'm no linguist, but I can divide the word into syllables and when I do that I get this:
re / vision
Vision means to see, and re means to repeat something. This means that at least one meaning of the word revision would be to See Again.
When you edit a poem you are checking grammar, spelling, syntax maybe, looking for lazy or unintentional clichés, redundancy, and so on, but if you want to revise a work you have to see the work again.
Revision means to look at the work with fresh eyes.
I remember watching a TV interview with James Dickey who was asked about writing his fabulous novel, Deliverance. Mr. Dickey said that revision was particularly hard for him, because when he wrote a poem (and he tended to write long poems) he would lay out all the pages on the floor so he could sort of scan the whole thing at once. He was looking at the work again (re-vision), but this practice was very difficult for him with a novel. Even a long poem might have only a dozen pages or so, but a novel will be made up of hundreds of pages. Who has a floor that big? My point is that re-vision is to re-see, and if that is the goal then we can start coming up with some activities or steps to make re-seeing the work possible and effective.
One of America's great poets, Elizabeth Bishop wrote a fabulous villanelle entitled One Art. Go to www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/drafts.htm and read this article about how Ms. Bishop struggled to revise this 19 line poem.
One of the problems that has bugged me most is that editing and revision is not as thrilling as composing. There is a certain excitement that surges through your body and floods your brain with a vibrating pleasure. Creating is fun because it is new. You sit there jotting stuff down, you come up with a neat-o mosquito phrase, and you pause and go, "I can't believe I just wrote that!" Revision is work. It doesn't feel spontaneous when you tweak, and adjust, and try, and fail, and retry, fiddle with, and fine tune a work.
For me it is a little like rehearsing for a play. A few years back I did some community theatre. Reading the play that first time was great. I could imagine me in the part, I was delighted by the story, but after going to rehearsals 5 nights a week for 3 or 4 weeks, I got to the place where I knew my lines, I knew everyone else's lines, and I had moved stage left on a key word a hundred times. At that point, the rehearsals felt like work, and all the fun was gone. The fun came back on opening night. Every show brought me a thrill because now we were presenting something that was perfected, imperfect, but closer to perfect than it would've been had we not done what had to be done.
Here are some steps to effective revision.
- Just know that your first draft is like panning for gold. You've got a pan full of dirt, rocks, and mixed up in all that mud are little grains of gold. This mind-set will help keep you from falling in love with every word you have written down. If you know most of it is crap before you start the revision then it won't bother you when you toss a lot of it out.
- Look for repetitions. Of course there are forms where repetition is part of the form (pantoum, villanelle, Sestina), but unless it is a requirement of the form, at least one revision should be dedicated to saying what you have to say only once.
- Give your re-looking some space. You can look at stuff so long that your eyes cross and you can't see something that is right in front of your face. Put the work aside for a few hours, or days, and then come back and re-look at it. I read a biography of Robert Frost where I learned that some of his later work was based on early drafts he had written when he was very, very young. He lunged around drafts of a poem, and did not complete the work for 30 years or more.
- Look for logic. Are you making sense? Is it making the sense that you want to make? Are you communicating what you intended to communicate, or is there something there that is distracting, misleading, or easily misunderstood?
- Write comments and questions on a draft of your poem. In the Elizabeth Bishop article mentioned above it points out that she wrote notes to herself in the margins of her drafts. Do that. If you don't, you will forget the ideas. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. We get old and the filter in our brain that once resembled a Mr. Coffee paper filter, becomes a net with big gaps that lets more get past than is good for you.
- Have someone or a couple of people you trust and share a work with them, and then take notes on what they say. If revision is re-seeing, then there is nothing fresher than looking at a poem with someone else's eyes. [WARNING: don't share too much, or too often. Too many cooks curse the verse.]
- Use contrasts. Try adding as many different kind of contrasts as you can. If it doesn't work, so what. Try stuff, and toss out what doesn't do it.
- It's supposed to be fun. Revision may not seem as fun as composing the first draft, but that is because you don't think so, and you can control your thoughts. Think differently. Think that revision is fun. Enjoy every part of creating, polishing, perfecting a work of art. That is what makes you an artist.
- Look for and delete summarizing words. Words like "joy, beautiful, delightful, blissful, pain, sorrow," and "splendor" because these sorts of words tell you what to feel instead of causing you to feel. that summarize without being linked to specific experiences.
- Look for ways for words and images to do double duty. The word still can mean not moving and it call also mean continuing to be there. Anything that give you multiple possibilities of meaning should be tried. If two or more of those alternate possibilities contributes to the point of the poem, then keep them.
- Think of the reader. As you look again at your work, check to see if the poem speaks only to yourself, or will some reader you may never meet understand the work the way you intend it to be understood..
- Look again at your poem. Is there part of the poem that is clearly good? Are there lines that come before the good part? Can you eliminate the boring stuff and start with the good stuff? Try it.
- Look for chances to read your poems before an audience. Don't hesitate to revise a poem after it has had a public reading. Just because you read it out loud to a gathering does not mean it was carved into stone. Never feel like it is too late to revise.
- At some point, count the cost. You can revise a poem forever, and the right version does not really exist. At some point you just stop, and say, this is the way this one is going to be, and write something else. No one knocks it out of the part every time. Maybe if something is never completely successful, it is still a stone you step on as you make your way to better works.
When I first read Emily Dickinson I sat and read this little selection of maybe 40 poems. About 6 of those poems seemed like the best stuff I'd ever read. Even Emily revised her work, and eventually she stopped and just called it done. Revise as long as you want to revise. Stop when you want to stop. Volume is not better than quality, but volume increases your chances at creating works of quality.
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