Revising: Or Giving Your Words a Whirl

My poems begin with people who did something that made me stop, frozen with hard-beating heart, the way I did as a child playing Statues after a friend grabbed my hand and spun me around.

Then there’s the wandering through libraries, collecting armloads of books about that person, the places where she lived, the company she kept, her moment in history. I muse over incidents I find as I stalk the character from home to work, try to peer into her cereal bowl or what’s left on her plate, and the softness of her pillow, and how long she might lie awake. All along I’m taking notes, which I spend a long time ordering not just through days but years. Though, of course, sometimes childhood moments appear smack in the middle of life as a grown up, so while admiring chronology, I don’t want to pledge to its logic.

I’ve put a lot of poems in order recently, mostly happy with the flow of events, my word choices, echoes, and imagery. Now I want to shake the poems like doormats in spring air and see what flies, or what’s left in the spaces where old dust was wedged. I want to spin things around and check angles I missed. I’ve lingered with images, wondering what the tracks in the snow, cobblestones on Boston streets, old moccasins, an obsession with Cleopatra and swans could tell me. I’ve set down my guesses, but it’s time to guess again, look deeper in the tracks or around the corners of those narrow streets. We want people to read poems more than once, and that means we have to make our way through them, I don’t know, a hundred times? There’s no need to count but there’s plenty of need to backtrack and set things awhirl once again. I begin with wonder, proceed with some knowing, and now want to return, for a while, to the state of seeing things anew.

Please visit Poetry Friday Roundup at The Drift Record where Julie Larios writes about a book of poems by Stacy Gnall called Heart First into the Forest, novels in verse, and the compression, elegance, and mystery poetry and fairy tales have in common. She’s convinced me to order Heart First into the Forest, because reading other peoples’ poems can set me loose from my own predictable ways, fling me into the right sort of dizzy and open-minded state for this stage of revising.