When I first saw this pile of scraps, I thought it was a flower. Then I looked closer and saw it was a whole head of garlic, split open and left on the curb. I imagine it was in someone’s trash, that it was picked apart by squirrels. I think it’s kind of beautiful.
What if a poem could do - rescue the scraps and turn it into something new and strange and gorgeous? It made me think of R. O. Kwon’s recent essay, “A Case Against Killing Your Darlings,” that makes the provocative argument that every sentence should be a darling:
I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings. I don’t want any published novel of mine to include a single line that bores me, that hasn’t been shaped, pressed, and attentively loved into the most truthful, living version of itself. I might even argue that it’s not possible to care too much about language, about punctuation. I am close to believing, at least with my own work, that a single misplaced comma is enough to risk bringing down an entire book. One careless line is a death knell; a paragraph, utter ruin.
More than polishing and perfection, I’m interested, in this prompt at least, in what happens when we rescue the bits we’ve discarded and put them all beside each other.
Prompt #22: the scrap heap
Find your darlings. Go through the lines and phrases in your poetry deck (the set of index cards I’d suggested you make in the very first post) and pull out all the bits you love the most but that never quite fit in a poem. Look through your old notebooks or files for the sentences or images or phrases that leap out at you.
Lay them all out physically if you can. I really like cutting and pasting to the wall with painters tape to help me see the parts of a piece I’m working on. If you can’t do that, zoom out enough on your screen so that you can see all the darlings at once.
Shuffle your darling until something happens - a shape, an unexpected connection, a surprising tension. You might write a new line or two, or you might kill a few again. But you could also just let all that strange beauty sit next to each other.
If you want a shape, try giving each darling its own line and using 1.5 spacing between the lines, so that the poem is one stanza, but with a bit of air in it.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life. I’m also on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy), if you want to check in there.