Writing & Revising Poems from Your Body (Not Your Brain)

poet, graphic designer, and writing coach Lindsay Lusby on how writing and revising lives in our bodies, finding the right form for your poems, and keeping your first draft energy as you edit

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features

Lindsay Lusby

, a poet and graphic designer who recently founded Perilune Editing with writer Amber Taliancich.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Today I’ve got a special guest post by Lindsay Lusby, the kind of rare person who’s talented with both words and images. Her first book of poetry, Catechesis: A Postpastoral, includes beautiful full-color collages alongside poems. She’s also a talented graphic designer who’s made broadsides, tour graphics, bookmarks, and even the logo for Write More. Lindsay’s long been a writing teacher and has worked as a coach with poets who want personalized revision and submissions help, and she’s recently launched Perilune Editing with writer Amber Taliancich. Below, Lindsay shares some of the strategies she’s used with her devoted poetry coaching clients. If you’ve been wanting a little more body and intuition in your writing practice and especially your revision strategies, I think her warmth and guidance will help unlock something for you, too.

Lindsay, on honing bodily intuition in a writing practice

I became a poetry coach four years ago, at the strange and scary beginning of the pandemic that changed all of our lives, that changed our relationships to our work and our art, when I left a seemingly-secure job that I used to love for a new, very uncertain career path. These last few years have been full of revelations. But I think the most profound discovery for me has been how much I absolutely love coaching and mentoring other poets, how much true and deep fulfillment it brings me, especially because I feel like I only stumbled into it out of my own private desperation. It’s part creative guidance and strategizing, part therapy and cheerleading. And the moments when I get to witness a poet move past an obstacle that has been blocking them for years or reach a milestone they weren’t sure they’d ever reach—are truly exhilarating.

As a writing coach specializing in poetry, there are many different questions that my clients bring to me, but many of them are questions that live between the lines of a creative writing craft book. Not the what, the where, the when, or the why—but the how: How do I know if my work is good enough? How do you know when a poem is finished? Sometimes the guidance is more straightforward, but there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all answer. And then there have been some questions that require us to move past surface-level logic and dig down into the essence of how we listen to and hone our bodily intuition in our writing practice.

Those elusive elements that make a poem a poem are felt within our bodies just as much as (if not more than) our beautiful brains. And so it follows that much of the writing and revision process also lives within our bodies. If our brains are having a difficult time pinning down an intuitive process, something that moves just out of view the moment we think we’ve captured it, like a dream upon waking, I can almost guarantee you that this part of the process instead requires you to listen more deeply to your body—your heart and your lungs, your diaphragm and your gut, your arms and your legs—all those pieces of you that this humming electricity is constantly moving through. It’s the same general principle behind why taking a walk helps to refocus creative energies.

the gorgeous logo Lindsay designed for her new venture, Perilune

if you’d like to try it out . . .

to make decisions about structure for your poems

As a poet and an editor, what I look for in a poem’s structure is a pattern that both gives order to the words on the page and grants the feeling of movement—or freedom of movement. This is especially important to pay attention to when writing in free verse, where we are always essentially creating our own forms and structures. It’s more intuitive than it is strictly logical and it involves both looking at the poem on the page and reading it out loud—so in a way it’s an additional sense that is suspended between sight & sound. Like poetry feng shui. When reading a poem on the page, I’m both looking and listening for how the poem flows, whether the energy moves & circulates harmoniously or whether it feels blocked or obstructed in certain areas. And when I encounter even a little bit of the latter, I just move around the poem’s furniture until I feel like we’ve tapped into the poem’s natural sense of flow.

Couplets and tercets are the most basic building blocks for stanza structure. So when in doubt, I start with couplets. And if that doesn’t feel quite right after I’ve tried it out, then I’ll experiment with longer stanza sizes—tercets or quatrains. But my personal preference is generally for shorter stanzas because this allows us to insert more air or white space into the body of the poem, meaning that we avoid big blocks of text that, at times, can feel a bit impenetrable visually.

Line indents work in the same way! I often choose to incorporate a pattern of indents in order to unblock a sense of movement that the poem needs but isn’t achieving through stanza breaks alone. They can create a stronger sense of continuation from the previous line, so indents work especially well when paired with lots of enjambment—so we can have the benefit of line breaks, while simultaneously creating a sense that the poem is flowing unbroken—like waves. It’s all about experimentation and paying attention to what the poem is telling us that it needs.

to recapture that 🌟first draft energy🌟 when you revise

We want to figure out how to approach revision the same way as writing a first draft, so that we can harness that same spark of inspiration & creativity and the power of that original momentum. Part of the problem is being able to reenter that same headspace you were previously in when you wrote the first draft of the poem. So try reading the poem draft out loud a few times to get that voice and rhythm back in your ears and in your mouth—that same tone, inflection, mood, and atmosphere. It’s like a very specific kind of guided meditation. Then write the current poem draft out by hand at least once to warm up your writing hand and further ingrain that poem’s voice in your mind again. Let it be a full-body experience—you’re embodying the poem draft.

Now starting with a blank page, freewrite for at least five minutes with a focus on only one particular line that needs revising or reworking. The one rule here is that you have to keep your pen moving the whole time. Set a timer and don’t put the pen down until the timer goes off. When the time is up, go back and read what you’ve written and see if there is a promising line you might lift out of this messy draft that will work for the line revision for your in-progress poem. Underline in a different ink color and make additional notes in the margins of your freewrite page. Then rinse and repeat!

Lindsay Lusby is a poet, editor, writing coach, letterpress printer, and graphic designer who loves to experiment with all forms of art at the intersection of text and image. She is a maker of visual poems & zines, and a designer of broadsides & books. Her debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. The author of two previous chapbooks, her poems have appeared most recently in Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, New South, and Gulf Coast. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry.

Lindsay’s recently partnered up with Amber Taliancich to launch Perilune, which offers an exciting range of services for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid genre work. They provide one-on-one coaching sessions, editing & manuscript consultations, broadsides & book design, graphic design for author events & book promotion, and—coming very soon—online workshops and professional development classes for writers & artists. Check out their new website and send them an email if you want to work together.

You can find Perilune on Instagram, Twitter/X, & Threads as @periluneedits, and on Blue Sky as @periluneedits.bsky.social. Lindsay’s on Instagram, Twitter/X, & Threads as @lindsaylusby and Blue Sky as @lindsaylusby.bsky.social. Amber is on Instagram & Twitter/X as @ambtali, and she’s also on Instagram as @little_printmaker.

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.