Ideas for Writing

Dawn Potter

Lines are movable elements in a poem under revision. As a poet writes, she often shifts her lines around, and each new position offers her new imaginative options. A line that begins the poem may now end a poem, or it may start a new stanza, or it may suddenly break into two lines.

            Dickinson herself offers an example in two versions of a poem numbered “494” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (both dated circa 1862), in which she demonstrates that even subtle revisions greatly influence the impact of a  poem. Here’s a section of version 1’s final stanza:

What could it hinder so—to say?

Tell Him—just how she sealed you—Cautious!

But—if He ask where you are hid

Until tomorrow—Happy letter!

Gesture Coquette—and shake your Head!

Compare it with the same section in version 2:

What could—it hinder so—to say?

Tell Her—just how she sealed—you—Cautious!

But—if she ask “where you are hid”—until the evening—

Ah! Be bashful!

Gesture Coquette—

And shake your Head!

The revisions in the lines don’t, at a quick glance, seem earth-shattering. The poet has swapped one pronoun for another, added a dash and some quotation marks, broken one line into two, deleted some words, added a short new line. Yet something has happened. Even though the second poem looks rather similar to the first, it now sounds significantly different—not to mention that the pronoun switch has entirely reconfigured the piece’s impact on the reader.

            One of the simplest ways to experience the power of line in your own writing is to push yourself to experiment with line placement. Take out a poem you’ve already written—perhaps a draft of the exercise I suggested in chapter 1, in which each line begins with the first word of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81. Then try out some or all of these revision exercises.

1. Take the last line of your first draft and use it as the first line of an entirely new poem.

2. Turn the first draft inside out: now the original last line is the first line, and the original first line is the last line. Rewrite the middle lines to link the new beginning to the new ending.

3. Turn the middle line of your first draft into a question. Rewrite the other lines as necessary so that they lead toward and then away from that new central question.

4. Break every line of your first draft into two lines, rewriting as necessary.

5. Delete three lines entirely from your first draft, rewriting as necessary.

6. Make each of your original lines twice as long, either by adding new words or white space or by combining existing lines.

7. Choose your favorite line from the original poem. Now rewrite it, adding a syllable to one of the words. Now rewrite it again, taking away a different syllable. Keep repeating and experimenting, adding and subtracting syllables throughout the line.

These suggestions are akin to an athlete’s stretches or a musician’s scale practice. Even if the result of the activity isn’t a finished poem, you’ll be pressed as a writer to think more flexibly about line. For instance, you may find yourself asking specific questions about the kinds of words that begin and end your new lines. Are they transitions? Descriptors? Actions? Do they break, or enjamb, the syntactic flow of the sentence, or do they preserve the phrases in natural groupings? Which of these new words seems particularly compelling to you? Which ones seem almost invisible? How does the sense of a line change when you add and subtract syllables? What new cadence patterns are you noticing?

All of these experiments and discussions work equally well as student assignments, and they are a good way to help students break the stigma of the word revision. For most of us, the term probably still conjures up the excruciating boredom of the high school research paper. Yet for a poet—for any creative writer—revision is the center of the endeavor. We try something out; then we try it in different way; then we try it yet again. The task is not only necessary: it’s also interesting.

So if you’re a teacher, you will only gain from leading your students through revision exercises that emphasize experimentation and independence (rather than tedious research protocols) but that also offer structural parameters that are easy for both you and the class to assess. Did X add a syllable or didn’t he? Did Y turn the sentence into a question or didn’t she? You want your students to express their inner lives, but you also want them to understand that poetry is an intellectual activity, not just words thrown onto a page.

These exercises also give you and your students ways to talk productively about a poem in process. It can be scary to proffer a personal remark about another human being’s creative work. It can be even more terrifying to wait for comments on a new raw piece you’ve just produced. These kinds of revision activities circumvent that fear because they give both you and your students specific tasks and assessment criteria, even as they allow bottomless freedom of expression.

[This has been another installment from the draft of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet, currently under heavy construction and forthcoming in 2014 from Autumn House Press.]