Some editing tips

Courtesy of CE Chaffin, via Shann Palmer:

In this enterprise some things occurred to me that may prove helpful to others in the editing process. Here goes:

1) Always suspect the ending. You may have to strike one or more lines. Watch out for dilution, for over-explication.

2) Suspect the first stanza. Often the first stanza is like starter fluid; it’s only there to get the car started, it’s not really part of the car.

3) Transitions from the first to second and from the penultimate to the ultimate stanzas are frequently muddled. Make sure the substance is clear.

4) The title can almost always be improved. Taking a phrase from the emotional climax of the poem is reliable and works well. To make the title a comment on the poem is also good. To make the poem dependent on the title for its full meaning is very good if you sin neither in obviousness or obscurity.

5) Unless you have a very good editor, time is your most valuable ally. Give a bad poem five months in the drawer and when you take it out again you’ll most likely put it out of its misery. With truly inspired poems it’s tempting to go off trying to get the perfect draft the first night, but that way lies madness and robs a poem of its juice, which is hard to recoup. Remember: with each revision you lose a little more juice. Beware an over-reified poem; it is the mark of too many revisions. Such a poem reads unnaturally, perhaps even stilted; it has been sucked dry. (This made me think of Auden for some reason.) ;-)

In other words, beware, beware, beware! But beware of being to wary; that's wearying.

The all-there poems and the inert whatyoumaycallem's...

Every so often I come across a blog entry that's so right-on I save it in my own archives for future reference -- if only to have it on hand to help me formulate a (perhaps) more comprehensive prefab opinion of my own. (So much of blogging -- indeed, human communication-- consists of passing on the words of others, in various guises, if not outright quotes, as here...) Here's one from Jordan Davis from a month or so back, a particularly well-put variation on the 90%-of-current-art-is-shit theme:

...whatever people want to say about David's (nota: I guess that's David Lehman's BAP) annuals, I know for a fact there are a couple hundred poems published every year that I'd be willing to show just about anybody and say "Hey I liked this one a lot." Are these lost Yeats poems? No, they're just all there. (Some of them are spacey, but they're all up in that spaciness.)

Right now my problem is with inert poems. Poems that float a half-cute line or semi-relatable experience, and are done. No crazy language no wiggly perception nothing unknown. Nobody needs poems that don't do anything. I get no culture ruboff, no actual sharing in someone else's experience, no insight, nothing.

Based on my reading, I'd estimate these inert compounds take up three-quarters to five-sixths of poetry publications. Most people would call that a generous estimate. I'm really not that harsh a reader. And I desperately don't want to give any poet what they used to call a complex.

I'm just not looking forward to telling the truth about this, which is that when a journal gets one out of three poems right, it's a keeper. That ratio should be more like three out of four. A few journals have made it there this year: Superflux, the Massachusetts Review, The Canary. And it's not the editors' fault, I know, I'm an editor. The poems come in, they are good enough to get all Winnicott about it, and voila, print.

What I'm saying is NOT: Edit, self-punish, work harder, strive, or please the great-withholder-in-the-sky. I'm saying, no more "I have three unpublished manuscripts." Make them one good manuscript and get it in the hands of somebody who loves it. How to do that: Get some friends you trust and let them tell you -- not what the good ones are or any other horrifying inhibiting complex-inducing phrase -- let them tell you which ones they liked the most, responded to, remember. Look at those. Work on them. The other ones, you don't have to file them in the trash, you liked them enough to put them in "the manuscript," you just didn't like them enough to put them in other people's heads. That's ok, it's not easy.

FINAL LINES

Final lines have been accosting me lately. In a long-distance conversation with Adze, my own most careful and dedicated critic (lately we've been mailing poems back and forth and critiquing…) he was saying that that final line has to be the most crucial - and most difficult to pull off -- in any poem. It may not be difficult to come up with something approximately right in a first draft, but it's often very hard to get it right on, in a clear, wholly satisfying way. (Sometimes, of course, one can be right on right off …but as Sheryl Crow said about songwriting, "Inspiration's great, but knowing the craft will save your ass!" This little post is about craft…)

I have a tendency to sum up or round off poems with a cryptic or mysterious statement, or return to the beginning in a kind of "refrain" or circular movement repeating earlier elements or variations of one of the first lines (if not the first line). As methods for arriving at final lines go, the "circular method" is certainly the easiest and perhaps the most common. … but there are other ways to finish that are far more ingenious, can have more impact, or resonate more deeply. Ending with surprising image, one that somehow sums up the poem although it hasn't appeared before, is one way. Having a concluding image or idea that the whole previous poem "leads up to" is a related , probably rarer way. Victoria Chang's poem, Yang Gui-Fe, which recently appeared in the New England Review, is a superb example of a final concluding line that the whole poem leads up to and that encapsulates the whole thing. Or think of the final lines of Hughes' Thought Fox.

Adze was also telling me that in my own recent poems (or rather, drafts of poems) some of my concluding lines might be best deleted so as to allow that deeper kind of resonance to happen. I think he's right here … I don't pretend to be immune at times to final line deficiencies. For instance, one rather lengthy draft called Emblem, I end with

lines bars binds of thought blending into colours curves hues
memories time and now on a shelf
this picture, twenty-three years later, me smiling with you --
I had put the camera on the rock and set the timer, we had to do it
a few times to "get it right" --
around it stones and twigs we had picked from the shore, embedded with dust,
emblems selected from that day

(NB: because Blogpspot protocol doesn't recognize internal spacing and pushes all lines to the left, the lines quoted above end up being rather more compressed than I'd like ... to see them more faithfully reproduced, click on my blog-city link …)

Adze suggested, take out the final "summing up" line, and let it end with "embedded with dust", a final image which packs much more symbolic resonance… Emblem too becomes a more interesting title: because it is a word that no longer in the poem, and therefore sheds a more singular light on the poem (more about titles later). This tendency to "talk about" and "sum up" with a line like "emblems selected from this day" is a habit taken from literary analysis, he thinks… I tend to think though that it's just crude expression of our need for symmetry…

(For some of our correspondance, see Blog City, June to August. )

After this conversation, I looked up Mark Strand on Poetry Connection (that was just before the Strand reading I attended). What did I see?

Mark Strand - Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

This is one excellent poem about dying… right up to that final line. Hate to say it … that line is terribly trite. Certainly unworthy of Strand. "Tell yourself that you love what you are" ... did Oprah take over? What a shame!

Staring at the poem with this god-awful line as if it were one of my own, I thought, hey, maybe it could end something like this:

tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you will go on
that you are.

This is of course is following the common "final line" method: Going back, repeating a major element in a kind of refrain or circular return.

Maybe, though, there's a better way. A more cunning, ingenious way…an encapsulating image, perhaps… can anyone out there come up with one? (It's fun to test our editorial skills this way…)

REVISING/SUBMITTING

This week, have been going through unpublished work, revising. Cutting out excess. Tightening. Changing words. Finding redundancies that previously seemed integral. Always the struggle of sound and sense: what may sound good causes us to overlook whether it makes sense, or can be read in unintended, detracting senses… Or on a more subtle level, one poem began well, even ended well, giving a sense of formal completion -- but somewhere along the way evaded the point, bifurcating into a clever word game (successful, perhaps, as a wordgame, but word game nevertheless) rather than drawing upon and developing the central feeling that brought out those strongest beginning lines. Emerging from all this: a greater sense of solidity, as the words - every word - is sharpened and considered… but when is the poem ever truly solid? There have been plenty of occasions of delusion along the way. The language is a palette of a million colours, and the colours of the poem can be changed instantly. (Much easier than say on a canvas…) That's the difficulty … but also the beauty & delight….
All this of course occasioned by the desire to send more work out, even a sense of pressure, as it's already mid-October, and I have very little out there…. and finding in the last few months that almost everything recent I planned to send has been marked with changes, strikeouts, etc. (a lot more than even I had realized). So it's really not ready. Ostensible reasons may be visibility, a growing list of credentials, etc. But in the meantime, sending out has at least one benefit: I am guaranteeing myself at least one more attentive reader … namely, myself.