I’m an inveterate reviser. I obsess and tweak and shuffle words and paragraphs. I have an old-but-working typewriter I used to use for revision, and I loved it because the deliberate force required to type on a manual typewriter helped me to think about the sound of a poem as I typed and retyped it.
But: obsession isn’t always useful. And that desire for perfection can squish the life right out of a draft. I know there are poems I’ve revised and edited and snipped and compressed until they’ve become dense little nubs.
This week, a revision prompt: revise into the wildness.
One of my favorite moves in a poem is the unexpected leap. Erika Meitner is the master of this in her long poems, like Porto, Portare, Portavi, Portatus, the last poem of her book Copia—like, one minute we’re at baggage claim in the Akron airport, and the next we’re thinking about the invisible grief we all carry. And part of how she makes those big intellectual and emotional leaps happen is through juxtaposition: from the baggage claim to scripture to soldiers returning from war. I also really love this element of Camille Guthrie’s work, like her poem Diamonds (the title poem of her gorgeous new book!), which starts out contemplating Judith Butler and the performance of gender identity as a single mom and also draws in the little green monster on the cell phone game her daughter’s playing and Michel Foucault and Queen Gertrude. (That poem also includes the lines “I think I’m stuck in Hamlet/in the role of Queen Gertrude/but not at all royal I’m from Pittsburgh,” which, as someone who also grew up in Pittsburgh before it was cool, always make me laugh.)
But I don’t think this kind of weirdness and juxtaposition is just for poets or for quirky literary magazines. I’ve been thinking about this great essay, How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance, by Taylor Harris, which was published in TIME. As the title suggests, it’s about finding comfort in ice cream during the pandemic, but it also touches on anxiety disorder, her husband’s tenure fight at UVA, a family history of breast cancer, and more. Every time you think she’s pinned it down, the essay wiggles and lets in a little more. And it’s richer for that—if she’d confined it more narrowly to, say, ice cream and anxiety, it wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting.
So, as a revision exercise this week, find an old draft or a snippet in your notebook or digital files and see how you can make it weirder. You could start by making a list of other topics you could toss in. Write a couple of paragraphs on a song you loved at the time you’re describing in your essay, or a dinner you cooked with the person your poem’s about. Do some quick research and find out what the big news stories were during the period you’re writing about, or what music might have been on the radio. See how you can make a little space for the unexpected in your work.
Two other ways to get a little weirder in your work:
Play with your sentence structure and vary your patterns. One way to get started is just to count the number of words in each sentence for a paragraph or two, then revise so that no sentence is within five words’ length of the one next to it. (As in, sentence 1 is 12 words, so sentence 2 needs to be less than 7 or more than 18 words.) You can also look at sentence structure more closely in terms of grammar: are you following a subject/verb/object pattern in most of your sentences? do you tend to use similar introductory phrases in lots of sentences? Once you’ve identified your patterns, switch it up. Add a deliberate fragment or a wild run-on.
Read your work aloud and think about the sound. Add some alliteration or half-rhyme. You don’t need to go all Sally Sells Seashells but a little repetition can do a lot for the music of your prose.
a few of my favorite things
I took Lilly Dancyger’s essy revision intensive last spring and loved it. She’s a great teacher—clear directions, full of insights, no nonsense or extra chit chat (something I especially appreciate on zoom!). She’s teaching another essay revision intensive on March 5; you can follow that link to sign up.
I have really loved having my 8 year old hang out with me and share his various thoughts about Hogwarts and Minecraft while he’s home on quarantine, but I’m also genuinely considering a boat surrounded by sharks as a childcare option if he doesn’t go back to school soon:
So, here’s where I’m at: I’m building a boat, stocking it with cranky boarding school principals, putting my child on it, and floating it out to shark-infested waters. Once it sets sail, I’m taking a nap, restarting a skincare regime, and putting on skinny jeans. You want in?
Pocket Universe, my next book of poems, is off to the printer! (Its offical pub date is March 1.) I can’t wait to share it with you. You can pre-order it through LSU, at Bookshop, on Amazon, or ask your favorite local bookstore to order it for you. And hold on to your receipt—I’m working on some fun thank yous for preorders!
How is your writing going? What’s your revision process like? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).