How Long Will You Revise a Poem?

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an extremely methodical  and downright slow writer. I was surprised to read that she only published 101 poems in her lifetime.

She worked on her poem �The Moose� on and off for more than 25 years. I have poems from 25 years ago that I still look at and revise, but I can't say that I have been "working on them" for all that time. For "The Moose," she had it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines.

We all have our distractions. For Bishop, writing letters was one. (Perhaps today, she would be online and in email.) She once wrote 40 letters in a single day and said, �I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here.� A collection of her letters, One Art: Letters, was published in 1994.

I don't classify coming back to a poem written years ago and making changes as the same kind of revision as when I sit down every day for a week trying to get a poem to a place where I feel comfortable reading it to an audience or sending it out to the world.

I also have notebooks of typed and printed poems that feel unfinished that I rarely look at and even more rarely work on any more.

What is your revision process?


Here is the opening of "The Moose."

The Moose
For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats�
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches...

read the rest of the poem

�Container� by Fiona Apple

I was screaming into the canyon
At the moment of my death.
The echo I created
Outlasted my last breath.

My voice it made an avalanche
And buried a man I never knew.
And when he died his widowed bride
Met your daddy and they made you.

I have only one thing to do and that's
To be the wave that I am and then
Sink back into the ocean.

Sink back into the o-
Sink back into the ocean.
Sink back

Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry

A resource that might be especially useful for teachers of poetry, but also poets, critics, and publishers, is available from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute in collaboration with American University's Center for Social Media and its Washington College of Law. They have created the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry."

Devised specifically by and for the poetry community, this best practices code serves as a guide to reasonable and appropriate uses of copyrighted materials in new and old media.

"This document," says project adviser Lewis Hyde, "brings wonderful clarity to the otherwise opaque world of poetry permissions. It is a useful tool that should serve poets, critics, and publishers alike."

It is available as a free free download (pdf) from the Center for Social Media.

From Pen Pal by Sugar Magnolia Wilson

1.
Hellooo. How are you?

I�ve only just started
witchcraft so this letter
includes some of my hairs.

My two guinea pigs had
million dollar babies �

two lots of babies.

Mum says they have the
eyeless ways of newborns.

Friday and I�m sitting
in the quad under the
acacia tree.

The bell has rung
and I�m waiting for
Mum or Dad to pick me up.

No one has come. It is
strange.

Did I tell you? I

Prompt: Shoveling Snow with the Buddha and Billy Collins

If you are in a part of the world covered with snow, you may identify in that way with this month's model poem: "Shoveling Snow With Buddha" by Billy Collins. Our prompt for February is writing about someone who is well known but in your poem "out of place."

I like that in Collins' poem the Buddha is out of place for several reasons. First, he is doing something and we are used to seeing him seated and meditative. We also usually find him in a nice temperate setting, not in the snow. Of course, he is also out of place because he is out of time, dropped into our present from his past.

Besides the idea that he is helping shovel snow, he is also quite interested in hot chocolate and playing cards after the shoveling - two rewards for his work, not unlike a child's rewards for helping clear the snow.

He is more Buddha-like in his mindfulness of the work.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

Collins is no real life Buddhist, though he is mindful, but the poem touches on several ideas in Buddhism. Like most of Collins' poems, the light, perhaps funny, surface of the poem is a way to slide into more serious points. In this poem, I am reminded about how often we forget that the journey is the destination, and how often we want to be anywhere but in the now.

This prompt asks you to place a well-known person (living or dead, real or fictional) somewhere out of place. There is the suggestion of something absurd in this, although Emily Dickinson at Starbucks is not as odd as if you made her a Victoria's Secret runway model, so the choice is yours when it comes to that aspect of the prompt.

Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015

Love Poems for Valentine's Day

Need some poetic lines (or inspiration) for Valentine's Day?

Try some classic and contemporary love poems from Poets.org.

From "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace...

to

"How to Love" by January Gill O�Neil

After stepping into the world again,
there is that question of how to love,
how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning�
the crunch of icy grass underfoot, the scrape
of cold wipers along the windshield�
and convert time into distance...

"Breathing You In" by David Gregory

From up here it looked

as if the harbour�s lungs inhaled

the fog in through the headlands;

light as breathing, concrete coloured,

it set in for the day, giving us each a
bubble vision

containing what little we know,

and out beyond the garden�s edge;

all life arrested.



There was a fog of the familiar

such that I could not see

all of the changes underway

between you and me.



But

Like a Butterfly by Jennifer Compton