Dear lullabies & alarms subscribers,
If you’ve had a chance to thumb through the first three issues of this newsletter and try out some of those wild & wooly writing challenges, you may be pondering what to do with the material you generated.
Or, perhaps you’re struggling with how to revise a particular poem, or how to approach revision in general. The next steps after generating a text can feel daunting.
For the next several issues of this newsletter, I’ll be diving deep into revision techniques which I hope you’ll find helpful. If you’ve attended one of my revision workshops in the past, there will be some familiar material, but I’ll be going into further detail so I think you’ll find some new useful nuggets.
More a Dance than a Walk
Before I get into a list of approaches (which implies a chronological hierarchy), a brief note on linearity.
Sometimes a poem can be revised with just one or two simple steps, like removing excess words or changing the line breaks. Often, poems ask for more than this cursory mentoring.
Just like a child, each poem is unique and may need to be “brought up” with a bespoke set of approaches. And these approaches are often non-linear—for example, going backwards and forwards and backwards again with removal and addition. So although I’ll be presenting ideas and tools in a certain order, it’s important to note that sometimes the very last tool on the list is the best one to apply first—and vice versa.
That being said, today I’ll share the first two steps I often take after generating a text.
1. Identify the Thesis of a Poem
In my definition, the thesis of a poem is its essential message, or its basic reason for existing.
A thesis is different from a theme.
A witty political poem might have politics, elections, or propaganda as themes, but its thesis will likely be a particular political point it’s making, or perhaps a sense of anger, frustration, or outrage.
A poem about the death of a loved one might have illness, funerals, and loss as themes, but its thesis might be something more like an agonized wail.
In a more experimental poem, which for example paints with sonic assonance, images, or lists, the thesis may be a particular phrase or clipping of the poem which best represents the tone, atmosphere, and mood of the poem.
Identifying the thesis (or, admittedly, theses plural, because that can happen sometimes…) isn’t easy. But at the same time, a thesis can be so expansive it can meet you wherever you happen to be.
But now I’ll make something clear, just in case:
Your poem’s essential message doesn’t need to be profound or world-shaking or amazing or clever. Identifying the thesis is NOT about assigning relative worth or value to your poem (and toxically, by extension, to your voice). So please, for your sake and your poem’s sake, don’t!
Identifying the thesis is just a way to help you support the poem to be its best self, whatever that self may be. Just as an architect incorporates the purpose of a building into her design, a poet who knows the thesis of their poem is equipped to build out the rest of the poem in service to that thesis (either directly or indirectly, which I’ll get to later).
So, how to identify it, if just reading it closely doesn’t immediately make it clear? Below are some of my approaches, listed in no particular order.
Listen—
You might close your eyes and feel your way to the thesis. Listen to your heart, your body. What did you feel—emotionally, physically—when you wrote this poem? What do you really want to express with this poem? Why are you bothering to write it?
Listen to the poem itself—what does it say its purpose is? Its answer might be surprising.
Look—
If you remain murky as to a thesis, you might try discovering or building the thesis. How? One way is to look for any interesting, happy accidents in the first draft—a moment of sonic assonance, an intriguing phrase, a particular idea or mood that shines through. In your mind, move that item into a central position and begin revising the poem in order to highlight and support that item.
I personally love discovering a thesis because I get to be surprised by my own writing! It’s like having a friend who says new and refreshing things I never would have thought to focus on.
Translate—
If you have trouble finding a “concrete” thesis, it may be that it’s being blocked by a more nagging/attention-grabbing thought, or it may be that it’s more subtle, abstract, or complex and not easily described. In that case, try translating the poem to another art form, even if just hypothetically. Ask yourself:
If the poem was a sound, what would that sound be?
If the poem was a painting, what would it look like?
If it was a dance, what would be its signature move?
Bounce—
One of the most surefire ways to figure out a thesis is to bounce it off someone else. Ask a friend or colleague read the poem and tell you what they reckon the essential message is.
Their answer will likely either
a) feel good, and you’ll think, Eureka!
OR
b) feel frustrating—you’ll find yourself thinking, No! That’s not it at all! It’s ______! And you’ll fill in the blank, and voila—clarity through contrast.
All in Service to the Thesis
Okay, so, no pressure or anything (!), but knowing the thesis of your poem can—ideally—be like knowing what your life’s purpose is. We don’t all know, and those of us who do know can lose track of it, BUT in the times when we do know why we’re here on Earth, life decisions can become simpler, because everything we do revolves around that purpose.
For example, a parent might feel that ensuring their child’s well-being is their central purpose in life. And (in the best case scenario of bountiful resources and opportunities) that guides them to make decisions around their education, employment, housing, and relationships that are all in service to that foundational purpose.
Knowing the thesis of a poem can guide us to make decisions about the poem—its shape, its form, its voice(s), and on and on. Crucially though, this doesn’t mean that every element we include in the poem should directly serve the thesis. It might indirectly serve it, by providing a contrast, or offering a side story or tangent, or allowing a pause for the reader to take a breath.
Challenges
Listed in order from simpler to more involved:
Choose a poem you’ve honed to a finished state and try to identify its thesis.
Choose a new poem for which you’ve only got a first draft and try some of the approaches listed above to identify its thesis.
Create a new thesis, and try to write a brand new one-page poem that primarily directly serves that thesis, but also includes a short section that indirectly serves the thesis in some way.
2. Identify where the poem begins
When I say “where the poem begins,” I’m not referring to the chronology of the poem (like whether certain formal elements or gestures occur in the beginning, middle or end of the poem).
Rather, I’m talking about where the writing ends and the poem begins.
Writing to Write
Often, in our first drafts, we write into a poem. That is, we begin writing in order to begin writing. We put our pen to the paper in order to get somewhere that seems poem-ish. And when we are successful, at some point, we arrive at that “somewhere.”
That “somewhere” is the point at which the poem begins. What we wrote before that point is often (but of course not always) simply warm-up text. It doesn’t need to be in the poem—it was in fact a runway. You can leave it aside now that you’re flying.
Writing to Think/Feel/Cope/Understand
Sometimes, I begin writing to guide myself. I may need to understand something, or to grieve or celebrate something. I may need to gear myself up to face something (a topic, truth, or problem). At these times, I often generate a lot of text both at the beginning and intermittently throughout the poem which has more to do with self-soothing and self-reflection than with poetry.
Of course, poetry can take the shape of self-soothing and self-reflection, but I think it’s important to be aware of when you’re doing this. That way, you can decide whether you’d like to include these often more intimate and/or colloquial parts, or to instead treat them as the byproducts of a process you had to go through in order to arrive at what you might call the more poem-y parts (for which the language may be more metaphorical, imagistic, rhythmical, enigmatic, etc).
Your personal poetic style and aesthetics, the goal(s) of the poem, and its audience all have a lot to do with your decisions around this. I personally tend to leave out the self-reflective parts. For example, if I’m revising a poem about a breakup, I’d rather leave out the confessional or more personal and specific things I wrote in the first draft, and guide the poem toward an extended metaphor that doesn’t include many specific details (a depiction of a storm at sea, for example). I usually do this because
a) I’m private, and I like the distance it creates, and
b) I’m particularly interested in trying to make my experiences more universal/mythical; make them blend into the human experience.
That’s just me though! Each writer has different comfort levels and different interests (and these can change from poem to poem). Still, though the answer may be different for everyone and rely on a different rubric, I believe every writer can effectively ask themselves the same question:
In this first draft, what did I write for the poem, and what did I write for other purposes?
Challenge:
Take a look at a brand-new, first-draft text you’ve written.
Identify the thesis of the poem.
Next, take a close look at it. Where does the poem itself begin? What text in this poem was written for you (or for any other non-poem entity or purpose), and what was written for the poem?
Now revise the poem accordingly, making informed decisions based on your awareness. If you get stuck, try cutting, rearranging, re-prioritizing, and re-phrasing as your first approaches.
Up next: part II!
As ever, I’d love to hear from you. Thank you again for subscribing and supporting me!
~ Elisabeth