My new course has launched!
Life After Birth: How to Mentor a Newborn Poem
This online, self-paced course is essentially a one-on-one poetry revision mentorship with me. You’ll have the opportunity to try a multitude of approaches for revising poetry—including: identifying and describing what is/isn’t working; finding the thesis of a poem; finding the poem within the writing; expansion & contraction; showing & telling; consistency; play; building a geography (also the topic of today’s newsletter!); incorporating a volta; choosing a title; being intentional.
This is an exercise-intensive, feedback-heavy course. Come prepared with about 14 poems to work with, OR bring just one or a handful of poems, and revise it/them multiple different ways. If you choose the full version of the course, you’ll receive feedback on all your revisions. The “lite” version of the course includes feedback for two revisions.
You’ll walk away with a rich set of revision tools—and potentially a whole swathe of revised poems.
To make the course financially accessible, there are two versions, each with a sliding scale, as well as a waitlist for free spots. See more details and pricing structure on the registration page.
…And now on to today’s topic!
The Geography of a Poem
The poet is—or can be—a tour guide for the reader. I mean this literally, rather than figuratively: The poet designs the physical, narrative, symbolic, visual and/or auditory landscape which the reader navigates.
The poet can make the way complex or simple; they can offer directions, or leave the reader to explore.
No choice a poet makes is “wrong” or “right,” “good” or “bad.” It’s just important to recognize that as a poet, you are making choices—and if you automatically choose a default aspect of form, it’s still a choice, even if not a conscious one.
As much as I love spontaneous writing and improvisation, (and I love it a lot; I made a course that focuses on it) I think the biggest reason to practice spontaneity is to grow our creative process, strengthen our inner voices and our capacity for play, and learn tricks for quelling the tides of self-doubt.
In short, spontaneous (non-composed) writing is an incredible practice—for the poet.
However, if one is writing (or revising) with the reader in mind, it’s best to make choices consciously, carefully, and purposefully, rather than simply defaulting.
(You definitely don’t always need to write for a reader, but I’ll focus here on this goal).
Know Your Options
So, what do I mean by geography?
I mean the art of form, in all its vastness.
The term “form” can include many things, including a poetic organizing principle (whether it’s a sonnet/free verse/ghazal etc) as well as its size, shape, format, appearance, structure, presentation, and overall concept.
What do I mean by “default” aspects of form?
I mean various formal (having to do with form; not requiring a tuxedo) devices which we tend to use because we associate them with poem-y-ness. A few examples:
a left- or center-justification (when it’s left justified, I feel like there’s a rigorous “spine”, which can be less or more helpful, depending on the poem)
line breaks (prose poetry or mixed forms can often be really powerful)
a lack of white space (cramming things on the left side of the page, or having no verses)
a lack of extra-poetic devices (I’ll describe these in a moment)
There is nothing whatsoever wrong with any of these; many a prizewinning poem has been simple in its form. And many a prizewinning poem has pushed outside of these defaults.
Deliberate Formal Choices
I’ve written before about the value of being intentional in the revision process:
In that post, I included a handy chart of intentions; it’s a circular array of different aspects of a poem to be deliberate about. One of the subsets or rays included in that chart is form, and it looks like this:
The list above the word “Form” isn’t meant to be comprehensive. It’s a list to check in with, to eyeball and see if anything in there would be useful to tinker with in your poem. I could have added many more! But here’s a quick breakdown of what I meant with each:
Stasis & change – Is the form symmetrical or predictable or is there a change anywhere? This is especially something to consider for longer poems. Change can break up any potential monotony, and can also denote a shift in the content. Think about shifting from poetry to prose-poetry; from metric lines to non-metric; from complex ones to simple; from long to short; from left-justified to right-justified.
Compression & expansion – Is the poem packed together like tightly woven cloth, or is it more like lace, with lots of room in between lines/verses/words? What density would serve the poem best, at each line or section?
White space – Is the emptiness, pause, and breath implied by any white spaces on the page (anywhere that there isn’t anything printed) being used to the poem’s best advantage?
Size – Could the poem use more space? Are you trying to pack it all arbitrarily onto one page for neatness’ sake when it really could use three pages to spread out into? Alternatively, are you spreading out the poem when it could benefit from being more jewel-like?
Shape – Poems can look like objects; can have shapes, designs. Here’s a great example—a poem by poet J. Maak, just recently published in Wild Roof Journal.
Poems can also take more subtle, suggestive shapes. For example, if the poem centers around a feeling of confusion, you could shape it on the page to embody that, or subtly nod to that.Line breaks – Are there any? Should there be any? What would serve the poem best? Where are the best places to break each the line? If you’re not writing in strict meter, you have freedom. Making lines look even is not always the best choice for a poem. Try out different ways of breaking lines and see what works.
Capitalization & punctuation – Adding or removing these aspects can change the entire tone and presentation of a poem. Play around with it—capitalizations denote importance, and beginnings. You could use them in an innovative way outside of the sentence structure. Or you could remove them entirely. Commas may not be needed if you’re using other pause-ful devices like horizontal spacing/indents, line breaks, or typography changes. Play with the different dashes - – — and choose what works best.
Multidisciplinary – There are so many forms a poem can take, and so many ways to combine poetry with other art forms. You could gear it towards slam poetry performances; you could paint it on a fence. You could create a poetry comic around it, combining image and design elements with the words (for an in-depth intro to this art form, check out this essay by Bianca Stone). Perhaps your poem has characters or voices—you could make it into a mini-play or monologue. And poetry videos—a direct analogue of music videos—are quite the thing right now.
Take a look at your poem and really think about what its strongest form would be.
Flow
A comic artist is very conscious of the concept of flow. This refers to the way the artist makes decisions around everything (text, story, panel shapes/sizes, drawings, colors, direction across and down the page) to guide the reader’s eye. An experienced artist will know how to provide all the elements needed to guide the reader, even across a comic with an unusual or haphazard layout.
We poets can learn from flow. A typical poem may not involve drawings or even narrative, but it too has imagery in the text, it has sound, words and lines and verses look certain ways on the page. So a poet needs to think about flow too—how will the reader get from this metaphor to that? From this verse to that? From this idea to that? From this mystery to that resolution? And on and on. We have so much at our disposal as far as tools to arrange the reader’s traversal.
Building Expectations
Composers and filmmakers are each skilled at building expectations—then either meeting them or not meeting them.
Music composers/songwriters know about using certain musical techniques and tools to lead a listener toward an arrival point like a chorus or a key/mode shift or another big musical moment.
A typical plot in a movie or TV show (or novel) often includes the protagonist being foiled over and over until they finally succeed (or not). Each time they make an attempt at achieving their goal, we think excitedly to ourselves, oh my goodness, are they gonna make it? This not only helps to wrap us up in the story, to engage us, it also focuses us on the path of the narrative and guides us along it. The writers/directors are making umpteen careful choices to lead us through their artwork in the way that they intended.
For poets, using various elements of form in these ways will not just help to engage a reader, they can help your poem be its most powerful self. The decisions around where to break a line or verse, or how slowly to reveal something, or what space to include, or where the can contribute greatly to this idea of building expectations, and each decision matters.
Extrapoetic Devices
These are anything that contributes to the poem and to the reader’s understanding of the poem, but which aren’t the poem itself. They include pretty much anything you can think of: footnotes, endnotes, dedications, titles, epigraphs, marginalia, illustrations, graphs, soundscapes, and so on. (You could even write the poem entirely as footnotes, but the incredible Ocean Vuong would have beat you to it).
Before you revise a slightly subtle poem because you’re keen to make sure the reader really understands it, think about the form first. If you like the text how it is, then keep that subtlety and instead, think about how you might arrange it on the page, or what framework or extrapoetic devices you could give that might help elucidate the poem without making the poem itself too obvious.
When we’re writing with the reader in mind, and/or really want to communicate something, just keep in mind that you’ve got more than just words at your disposal.
Here’s a handy chart that covers what I’m discussing (or download it as a PDF).
Challenge:
Choose one of the following two options:
Create a poem that prioritizes some aspect of form as noted above.
OR
Revise a poem you’ve written. Focus on prioritizing some aspect of form.
Quick note from me:
Thank you everyone for your support. I love teaching poetry, I love writing it, I love editing it. I’m grateful to you all for reading this and offering me your attention, and for coming to my workshops and participating in my courses. If you feel like what I’m offering is worth recommending, I’d love if you could share/recommend my teaching and services!