The story I always heard about Pound’s In a Station of the Metro was this: it was pages and pages long, then he somehow cut it down to those two famous lines.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
[I know there should not be additional space between those lines, but I cannot for the life of me get the substack editor to fix it. Sorry.]
I have no idea if this story is true, but it’s an intriguing exercise. What would happen to a long poem of yours if you drastically cut it? How would a dramatic cut transform the poem’s moves, images, diction?
(Apologies for the title, or at least an explanation: I’m newly fully-vaccinated and dying to get the mountain of hair that’s grown in the past year plus cut entirely off my head.)
Prompt #28: A Dramatic Hair Cut
Find a poem of yours that’s fairly long - longer than a page, maybe even longer than two. This could be a poem that you actually feel pretty happy with, or maybe it’s one that’s never felt quite right. (Prompt #5 and #17 both suggested you go long, past the page, so you could draw on what you did on those days.)
Read through and find the image or line or phrase that surprises you. I think it’s better to approach this as mining, rather than cutting - you’re trying to find what’s odd and lift that up out of the poem, rather than trying to cut the poem down. Look for the weird, and write toward that.
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.