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by Anna A. Friedrich
If you are a poet who has a sense that your poems “just come to you” almost like “a download,” or your poems regularly arrive “fully-formed,” either you are a genius of exceptional rarity, or you are not yet a good poet.
You might be writing out journal entries in poetic verse, which is a lovely practice! Or you might be free-associating, stream-of-consciousness-writing as part of therapy— also a worthy endeavor. But if you really want to grow in the art of poetry, know this: after that first spark, most good poetry requires long revision.
Poem-making is attentive word craft. Perhaps that’s obvious enough, but it is also the careful craft of tending to the white space, or blank space—making room for large areas of the page to remain empty.
Yes, there are prose poems that present themselves as just that: prose—a chunk of text that takes up the page from left margin to right. But historically, most English poetry (and certainly the majority of what I write) has held a great deal of blank space. The line breaks, only an inch or so from the left side, and your eye is carried down to the next line. So much space on that first line just…left! Empty! This is not coincidental, it is part of the craft. Poets are continually asking: Where can I stop saying what I’m saying on this line? What should be the final sound of this line? What can be left unsaid?
I work a few different jobs; one of them is to write poems, another is to occasionally write and then preach sermons. In my tradition, we preach homilies— shorter sermons than the 35 to 50-minute sermon I grew up hearing every Sunday. I work hard to keep my homilies 20 minutes short. It is not an easy task! In fact, I find it’s a lot like the craft of poetry.
I must continually return to the sermon as I’m crafting it—the through line, the illustrations, how many verses to quote when I refer to the Scriptures, where to inflect, where to slow down, what to leave out. I don’t write out my sermons in verse form, but I tend to the “line breaks” and the “blank space” of the sermon very carefully. Have you ever heard a preacher who tries to say everything? Exactly.
Revision often looks like removal in a sermon draft or a poem. Leaving things unsaid is, in fact, a freeing practice. If you try to say it all, you are not writing a poem (but you could be writing a bad sermon). If you cannot edit, cannot revise and rework, cannot “kill your darlings” as is often quoted, you may want to shift your art away from poem-making.
Befriending the white space—what is left unsaid—is a primary task in poetry, but there’s even more distillation once words start to gather on the page. The work of distilling that which is essential to a poem is not unlike what your favorite liquor undergoes! There’s a squeezing, a heating and cooling, a purifying of each potent word, each syntax choice, each tiny piece of the magic that is punctuation.
This distillation requires a fierce inner dialogue for the poet that might go something like this:
“Those first line breaks may have been poorly chosen (probably were).”
‘My instinct to put a period here may have been influenced by a lazily chosen comma earlier (probably was).”
“That infinitive is split (does anyone care anymore?).”
“The rhyme scheme is sloppy (that’s cool, right?).”
‘Is this a new stanza, or…a new poem?”
“That adjective is all wrong (it felt so right at first!).”
“My modifiers are dangling (yeah, but loads of readers don’t even remember what a modifier is).”
“Yes, this assonance is promising (keep at it, girl!).”
“Oh! I loved that part (but it’s starting to sound sentimental).”
“Is my control of the metaphor too rigid? (yep).”
“Wow, that ending surprised me! (mmmm enjoy the fruits of your labor).”
This is the work of continuing to work on a poem; the work of editing and humility in this word-distillation craft. The poet Maggie Smith writes in Keep Moving,“…the problem solving is what I love most: the challenge posed by the not-right words in the not-right order.”
This can be turned into an excellent question for an aspiring poet—do you enjoy the challenge of putting words in the “right order”? Do you delight in finding “the order they like best” as Malcolm Guite cheerfully writes? Can you hang with (potentially years of) editing a poem composed of no more than 100 words?
Can you submit to not only your own edits, but those of fellow workshop attendees, or a few trusted friends or mentors who can read drafts and give feedback? This is slow and patient work.
“It’s all sweat,” said Leonard Cohen. This work of continuing to work requires the poet to return and return again to something as small as 2 or 3 disputed words, something as seemingly insignificant as a dash or a semi-colon.
Let it be said: we can over-edit. You might distill unto absurdity. We are all capable of smothering that spark right out of a poem, when we thought we were just working diligently on it! And, I’ll admit, though it’s hard to type this out…sometimes you need to abandon a poem.
I’ve been recently re-reading Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook,” and in a section titled Inversion (by that she means changing the normal word order), Mary writes, “Good inversion is wonderful. Good inversion is difficult to achieve. Bad inversion is never wonderful and rarely difficult to achieve.” It’s a punchy and humorous few sentences, but it’s also great advice for poem-making in general—it can be wonderful, but it is difficult to achieve.
The 2022 documentary film Hallelujah tells the multi-dimensional and decades-long story of Leonard Cohen’s song by the same name. My husband and I and our two teenage sons went to see the film in an old, beautiful theater, the kind with red velvet seats that pop shut noisily when you stand. My husband is a big fan of Cohen’s songwriting and poetry, so while I already had respect for him as a persevering artist, I was astounded to hear he worked on Hallelujah for seven years.
With no guarantee that we have that span of life before any of us, let’s shoot for returning to a poem at least seven times—to revise, distill, and practice patience with the words and white space—before sharing with others, or sending off to a publisher for consideration.
In his poem Hospitality, Malcolm Guite imagines each individual word in a poem as a welcome guest, interacting with the other “guests.” He encourages a very patient way of writing: listening for each word’s own wisdom, as they sit down next to the others, and then learning from them as “each unfolds the other’s mystery.”
May it be so.
Rev. Anna A. Friedrich is a poet, artist, homemaker, and small business owner. Among the things she loves the most are color, vintage textiles, kayaking with her husband of 20 years, and snuggling her creatures (cat Virginia and dogs Fiona & Lily). Anna and her family (not just the animals, they also have two wonderful sons!) live right outside of their favorite city, Boston, but not far enough to escape its famed weather, traffic, or critical spirit.
I've come to really love the revision process. It's like a fun little puzzle to solve, and so satisfying when a half-baked idea clicks into place. I've also found that most the time I have to cut some lines from the top because I was just finding my way into the poem, or maybe from the bottom because I didn't take the first exit. (Free editing tip for anybody who wants it! :))
Anna, this is so good.... distillation down to what we want to say is the art of poetry. Thank you for these thoughts.