James Cihlar
Poem Improvement:
A Blueprint for Building a Manuscript
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I remember when my partner and I bought our house more than ten years ago. I had been living in a seven-hundred square-foot apartment in Uptown, a hipster neighborhood in south Minneapolis, and he had been living in an old house in Whittier, a neighborhood of derelict mansions just to the north, with his old college roommate. Considering we were both in our thirties, life as married homeowners was coming perhaps a bit late, but we didn’t care. Such is the lot of English majors. We prefer books to cul de sacs.
I admit one of my guilty pleasures was the anticipation of cable TV. Bill and his roommates had it, and now I’d have it too, in our 1885 folk Victorian in an inner city neighborhood of St. Paul. As the frightening closing process neared, we diverted ourselves from buyer’s remorse by speculating on our new favorite channel. Would it be IFC, or Sundance, or something similarly artistic? It turned out to be HGTV, Home and Garden Television, the capacious channel of home-improvement shows. At that time HGTV focused more on interior design, and I lapped it up. Sean Pratt hosted Old Homes Restored, which wedged definitions of architectural terms such as soldier line and parapet walls between profiles of the hardy DIYers who bought neglected wrecks and turned them into faithful recreations. Lofty Ideas showcased residential conversions of a synagogue in Montreal, a laundry facility in Atlanta, and a flourmill in Denver. Homes Across America featured outrageously expensive and fantastically stylish properties in Key West, La Jolla, and the like; it was hosted, I assumed from the closing credits, by the husband of the show’s producer, a rapidly aging boy-toy. Although the network regularly featured gay couples on other programs, Designing for the Sexes asked viewers to believe that interior design preferences were rigidly determined by chromosomes. For this program a decidedly academic English host in tweeds mediated between a husband’s masculine desire for club chairs and taxidermy and a wife’s feminine desires for gingham and chintz.
Perhaps it is too much to chart national trends via programming on a lifestyle cable network. But over the last ten or so years, which encompassed national tragedies, international conflicts, global warming, and a precipitous economy, HGTV shifted from its desultory, expendable focus to the more hard-bitten approach of real estate programs, such as Bang for Your Buck, Designed to Sell, House Hunters, Property Virgins and My House Is Worth What? That is, until recently. The channel appears to be importing more programs from our optimistic, and socialistic, neighbors to the north. Canadian designers Candice Olsen and Sarah Richardson are ushering a return to the channel’s origins of focusing on design. HGTV’s sister station, the DIY Network, features programs such as Room Crashers, Bath Crashers, and Yard Crashers whose high-spirited “licensed contractors” revamp spaces, from blueprints to décor in three days, surprising unsuspecting shoppers at big box stores with free makeovers. Does this tie in to the resurgent hope of President Obama’s election in 2008 (factoring the natural delay of development and production time for television series)? And what does any of this have to do with building a poetry book?
Let’s suppose for a minute that putting together a poetry manuscript is similar to decorating a room. As I watch design shows, I sometimes think, That room must live really well. I bet the furnishings will only improve with wear. Or I’ll think, I’d be afraid to touch anything in that room. Perhaps there are as many styles for decorating a room as there are approaches to creating an order of poems. But all of them have something to do with complements, with synechdoche, with zeitgeist, with wholes being greater than the mere sums of their parts. And both are about creating pleasing, coherent impressions.
Two Toronto designers have achieved celebrity status on HGTV by revamping interiors in their metropolis, which they carefully refer to only in generic terms as “the city,” although their origins are underscored by their pronouncement of such words as process with a long o and radiator with a short a. Candice Tells All, which premiered in summer 2011, purports to be designer Candice Olson’s forum for sharing all of her trade secrets, so that viewers may also place bowls of flowers on occasional tables with exactly the same joie de vie as a professional. Debuting the same season, Sarah 101 demonstrates how viewers can match her signature style of layered fabrics and pastel wall colors, minus her fifteen percent fee. Apparently when accredited designers shop at Ikea, it is entirely different than when you and I buy flatpack furniture there. South of the 49th parallel, Josh Temple, Matt Muenster, and Ahmed Hassan of the Crashers programs cheerfully work alongside homeowners to gut and rebuild spaces, producing home makeovers in a mere three days. Understanding that each of these shows is arbitrarily prescriptive (“I use between ten and twelve fabric patterns per room”), I offer my own version of how to put together a poetry book. This is my own Manuscript Crashers, in which I give the kinds of advice that may be as quixotic and ephemeral as a television designer’s. And yet, I believe the individual pieces of it hold together somehow so as to equal an aesthetic. In the spirit of a cable network’s licensed contractor, here are some directives to help create a poetry manuscript from start to finish, or to revamp an existing manuscript. Give them a try. At the very least, if you don’t like the results you’ll simply need to repaint a room.
The Inspiration Piece
Television designers like to start with an “inspiration piece.” Often it’s some swatch of fabric, a favorite figurine, an oil painting. From this they like to say that they “pull” the colors for the rest of the room, or mimic a shape, etc. For poets, it’s a bit simpler. Because poetry is, in part, a conversation with our peers, you should read the newest poetry books, current journals, and study your favorites. Your favorites can be—and often are—writers that do not write like you. That’s good. We must read a lot, and we must write a lot. Designers habitually say, “Less is more.” For poets, “more is less” literally—in that we generate a mass of material and then begin cutting away. As you write first drafts, turn off your censor and generate poems. Keep it going every day, if you can. Your mind is an engine, your life is an enterprise, and your poems work from, elaborate, and develop your sense of how the world works, and how you work in it. Poems are a record of your attempts to mediate the world.
After you write drafts, it’s good to share them with other writers. There’s a stereotype that writers are sensitive and that readers are brutal. I noticed these assumptions particularly in college and graduate school. The sad reality outside of grad school is that writers are excited and readers are disinterested. If you get any kind of personal feedback from an editor, even just a scrawled “Thanks” on a form rejection slip, count your blessings. And if you get more, then bravo. A funny thing about criticism: there’s something strangely hopeful about it. By pointing out what’s wrong, by naming the mistakes of the past, we unavoidably imply a world in balance, lay claim to our inherent rights. Writers do this in their subject matter, and in their process: we move from criticizing what is to imaging what could be. Editors do the same in their feedback. These visionary acts require faith. However, if you get nasty feedback, such as “These poems are meandering and lack focus” scrawled on a rejection slip, wad it up as quickly as possible and throw it in the trash.
Here is one of the parts where I turn to the camera and tell you my trade secrets. When I read manuscripts, I look at the cover letter, and consider where the author has published previously. But I didn’t overly concern myself with that. I use that information primarily to help me get a sense of the poet’s ambitions and her sense of allegiances. More importantly, I read the table of contents page straight through and then begin by looking at the poems themselves. It’s true what you’ve heard—editors often read the first few poems and then decide whether to keep reading. Television designers talk about focal one sees when entering a room. So, by all means, put your focal treatment up front, i.e., place the attention-grabbing, funny, audience-pleasing, self-contained, freshest, smartest poems up front. Titles of poems are focal points as well; original, playful, genuine titles that work language for all it’s worth help encourage an editor to keep reading.
Most importantly, I look at the manuscript itself, searching for an arc, some progression—like the staircase or pyramid. I want to see writers asking unanswerable questions—riddles of human nature—and maybe catching a glimpse of the answer, of the resolution. But it needs to be a genuine question, a true enigma or quandary. I ask myself the question: Does this manuscript create the image of a poet whose home I’d want to visit? Is this the owner of a room I’d enjoy sitting in for two hours—either for its sheer beauty, or for novelty’s sake, or to experience comfort? I accepted manuscripts where the writer had many credits and a good pedigree, and I accepted manuscripts where nothing had been previously published. In both cases, I felt like it was not just a collection of poems, but a cohesive unit, a book—that it tackled a problem and offered a solution, or expressed an equation and offered the result. In the process it created its own structure, a shelter I could see myself occupying for a while.
One of the commonplaces of the business of poetry is how selective editors must be. I’ve sat on one too many panels where editors take pleasure in expressing to a room full of hopefuls how busy they are, how many submissions they get, how it all comes down to choosing the best of the best. I’m sorry, but that’s BS. At one of my previous jobs, sure, we only published, say, four books of poetry a year, but in terms of submissions, we received hundreds per year. That’s hundreds, not thousands. You know why? Because it actually takes a lot of work to create a manuscript, that’s why. Even more to send it out. I’m tired of the elitist line of rhetoric that’s used to justify rejections. This sense of overwhelming competition can be discouraging. Don’t buy it—at least, not completely.
Two relatively recent books on poetics discuss the at times hobbling effect that the tired old chestnuts about po-biz have on creativity. Stephen Burt in the introduction to Close Calls with Nonsense charts the rise of writing programs from mid-century on as creating a massive body of students that write what they knows, that is, that describe their childhoods.
By 1975, Ashbery, Rich, and Merrill had won major prizes. Many young people learned to writer their own poems by imitating one of the three; others were imitating Lowell’s “confessionalism” or Elizabeth Bishop’s emotional reserve. Increasingly, they were doing so in college courses, as creative writing programs proliferated. These programs encouraged a realistic, accessible, personal sort of verse: students wrote poems other students could understand, and they wrote what they knew—their own lives. (Burt, p. 6)
Although Ashbery’s work is often placed at the opposite end of the spectrum from Confessionalism, Burt accurately considers it a touchstone for contemporary writers who are more interested in capturing the moods and impressions of their daily lives. In a recent interview with Christopher Hennessey, Ashbery acknowledges as much:
We all misinterpret a poem for our own purposes. . . . You can’t possibly aim at a reader and have all the arrows hit the target. You have to try to imagine an ideal reader, who’s neither stupid nor able to know what your thoughts are, and somehow hope the poem will connect to her or him. (American Poetry Review, July/August 2011.)
Although Burt’s handy summary of contemporary poetics is based in solid scholarship, as this generally accepted outline reaches its third- and fourth-hand permutations in the scholarship chain, the story begins to replace the facts, with damaging results. If television designers like to lay claim to knowledge of sweeping movements or styles, such as “Hollywood Regency” or “Modern Urban Beach”—some of which they seem to be making up as they go along— so too do poets and critics like to suggest intimate knowledge of the works of varied authors by bandying about the names of camps. For instance, it is now commonplace that the coincident rise of Confessionalism and writing programs spurred reaction, experiment, and further fragmentation, ranging from semiotic explorations to a return to rhyme and meter.
Still, though, we weren't quite tired of fighting about traditional forms. So a group of writers calling themselves “New Formalists” began insisting that poets should really start writing sonnets again, neatly stepping around the fact that many poets had, in fact, been writing sonnets for decades. At more or less the same time, a bunch of writers called the Language Poets were insisting that sonnets were passé, neatly stepping around the fact that many poets, had, in fact, been avoiding writing sonnets for decades. Naturally, these two groups were much discussed, even though, as the scholar David Bromwich diplomatically put it with reference to the Language Poets, “they do not, as yet, appear to write good poems.” (Orr, 64-65.)
Many editors, poets, and scholars take these poetic labels very seriously, referencing deep philosophical and political motivations. Orr punctures stereotypes here as well: “Our avant-gardists have yet to topple capitalism by undermining narrative, but they've gotten some coveted jobs and made their way onto syllabi.” (Orr, 52.) Which leads to a healthy cynicism about the whole business:
So there you have it. Again, this version of events is in many ways ridiculous—a competent critic could poke ninety-five holes in it in under two minutes. But this history isn’t significant because it’s right, it’s significant because it reflects what many poetry readers say or imply when they’re talking off the cuff. (Orr, 65)
On the other hand, the virtues of such a cleanly defined progression in poetics is that we are able to codify and discuss lineage using mutually accepted reference points.
Why is poetry the land of “camps” much more so than fiction? As a professor, I’ve noticed that students have no difficulty whatsoever switching gears from Rita Dove to D.A. Powell, from James Wright to Jorie Graham. Although I’ve felt categorized in the process of submitting my work to journals and presses, as a writer I feel opportunistically inclined to learn from whomever I read and love, and I read widely. Although we may see poets swear allegiance to Language or Post-Confessional or Post-Avant camps, we usually do not see fiction writers so readily label themselves. They are more likely, it seems, to define themselves by relationships to individual predecessors, by name. If the craft of poetry writing is predicated on national writing programs, then where do all these camps come from? Burt says it is professors and critics, striving to carve our their own niches. Personally, I think it’s the editors. Again, the numbers game comes back around. With hundreds of submissions and only a few annual slots dedicated to publishing poetry, an editor may feel obligated to defend his choices. Sometimes a hard-and-fast adherence to a specific camp provides this justification. Another problem is that this academic system churns out product for a culture that is perhaps not equipped to process the results. If it is a hegemony, perhaps it would work if the end bought into the system of the beginning. But the fact is, many editors are not products themselves of this system. One might expect editors to be PhDs in Creative Writing, or at least MFAs, given the number of programs offering such degrees. Although liberal arts undergraduate degrees are perhaps common among the slim ranks of editors, it’s not a given that an advanced degree in English literature or creative writing has risen to the top. In fact, I once had a boss who took pleasure in frequently boasting, “Jim, you have a college dropout for a boss.” Let’s say we accept the hierarchical structure of academia, where one advances by study of movements, learning quantifiable and qualitative distinctions via a rich process of imitation, analysis, and interpretation. This is going to produce subtleties that will be lost on the editor who has a ready rejection of the “writing program poem,” or worse, will put blinders on her when she sees a Structuralist rip-off and can’t recognize it as such. In short, don’t assume that the academic process of screening and tenure applies to the methodology of publishing, and don’t assume that your editor is credentialed simply on this basis of his being an editor.
Publishers are often under pressure, sometimes self-inflicted, to measure success in terms of sales. Of course, literary history is filled with examples of first editions that bombed, only to be discovered by later generations. When Oscar Wilde died in Paris under an assumed name, his books were out of print. That has never been the case since. Before she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys answered an ad from a scholar researching her work who had presumed she was deceased. In Hennessey’s interview, previously mentioned, John Ashbery says that his first few books were ignored by readers and savaged by critics. He jokes that part of his longevity was fostered in the seventies when stoners discovered his work and remarked, “This is the stuff!” What sells well now may not make its way into classrooms, curriculums, or scholarship, with the obverse and the lateral and the converse also true. Because editors sometimes frantically cite sales and marketing as reasons for inclusion or exclusion, don’t confuse those statements with measures of quality.
Healthy skepticism aside, there’s also the pragmatic reality of reading. Although reading is an editor’s job, all editors are subject to the same distractions as other readers. Sometimes a window of opportunity opens and a press needs to acquire a good manuscript quickly. You’re very lucky if your manuscript arrives during that time, although there’s really no way to predict. With my own record of journal publishing, I’ve observed that the very poems dismissed by “lesser” journals have been accepted by “greater” journals. It’s the human circumstances of reading. All of which is to say, don’t elevate (or denigrate) editors beyond their mortal limits. Take your chances, be thick-skinned, and keep the work out there. Because I worked for nonprofit presses, I felt an extra push to deal honestly and fairly with writers—we were supported by not only the generosity of philanthropists and foundations, but by taxpayers, fundamentally. But the reality is editors are human and ultimately, they make choices that are arbitrary.
The Reveal
Most of the programs on HGTV and similar stations last a half-hour each, and follow a standard formula predicated on “before” and “after.” Each culminates with a reveal. Sometimes the hosts themselves will refer directly to the reveal as “the reveal.” This is the last five minutes of the show when the client sees the revamped room for the first time. Often there is dramatic music and mood lighting. Virtually always there is rapturous appreciation. Once, on a BBC America broadcast of “Trading Spaces,” I did see a homeowner’s refreshingly uncensored reaction. “This is absolute crap,” she said. It was funny and disturbing at the same time. She was right—the designer had taken a rural country home into an urban loft. But these exchanges have a rhythm to them, and she stopped the show cold. Otherwise, because it is television and one assumes producers have locked clients into ironclad contracts, they demonstrate a level of flexibility and openness unmatched anywhere else in the known world.
For writers, showing our work is “the reveal,” and we have many opportunities to do so throughout the process. Each context has its own advantages and inherent rules. Because they often involve communication, conversation, and critique, observing some basic principles on both the reader’s and writer’s ends of the exchange will help facilitate the best results.
Writing Buddy
With a writing buddy you have a one-on-one exchange of work. I show virtually all of my new poems to my partner, and he shows some of his to me. I rely on him to give me practical advice, including suggestions for cutting or rephrasing. I also gather a general sense of how strong or weak a poem is, in comparison to my others, from his reaction. This sort of exchange is generally in shorthand. I don’t want or expect theoretical examinations—just good, old-fashioned, honest, and useful advice and reactions.
What you see is what you get in conversations with your writing buddy; it’s okay to ask for a little clarification, but don’t push it. What you get in the long haul, over multiple exchanges, is much more valuable than what you could drag out of one conversation about one poem. In my case, I generally listen to this advice, and do what I’m told. Over time, working with someone you trust, whose opinion you care about, allows you to understand this shorthand. With a world full of schemas for critiquing poetry, it helps to commit largely to one, from a pragmatic perspective. Rather than comparing the multitude of advice one could get from a variety of sources, if you work mainly (not exclusively) with a buddy, you learn to read between the lines of not only his criticism but your gut reactions to his criticism.
Writing Group
The chief functions of a writing group, which may provide detailed, verbal criticism to a poem, is to create a discipline for writing—an excuse to write new material—to offer encouragement, and to socialize us as writers. Remember how in junior high and high school we learned by observing what our classmates were wearing, how they were talking, and what music they were listening to? And then we silently copied them? A writing group gives you the chance to do something similar, in a much more above-board manner.
Listen to what your writing group compliments in your work. Do more of that, and do less of what escapes notice. Concentrate on the positives. Listen to how your group members talk about their own writing, get names and titles of books they are reading, and admire what they do well in their work. Apply the same lessons to your own process. When someone gives you the courtesy of a thorough read on a poem, even if you disagree with it, respect the attention they paid, which is ultimately a compliment. If you are hearing the same things from different people over time, it may be worth taking to heart. But you should also recognize that some readers are sharper than others, and over time you will learn which ones are worth paying the most attention. The first time anyone does anything, it always looks odd. The context has not yet arisen which supports it. Don’t rule out innovation simply because it doesn’t match what’s familiar.
Even in informal meetings, basic decorum is important. Generally, one member reads her poem aloud, with no commentary, and then other members of the group respond with thoughtful reactions. Comments should be phrased as descriptions of the individual act of reading: when I read this, I thought you were saying . . . or this reminded me of . . . or I wonder if you mean. . . . Anyone can pick apart a poem, but finding something insightful, encouraging, and accurate to say is the real trick. I’m proud of a comment a student made in a writing group years ago, when he complimented a poem about aging for using the word “unadulterated” because that word contains the word “adult.”
The Room Makeover
Often when we send out individual poems to journals, we get simple responses: yes or no. Yes, they accept it and will publish it, No, they reject it. Sometimes editors will say that a certain poem out of a grouping “came close.” Use this to develop your sense of the taste or bias of that editor. If you send them work again in the future, try to choose poems similar to that one.
Rarely, editors may offer editorial comments on poems, saying that if you revise they will look at them again. Follow up on this. It’s a simple exchange, and don’t make it more than that. Get the magazine publication under your belt, and if you have second thoughts about the revision, save them for when your book comes out. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the magazine editors will accept your work even after you revise it. There’s an old joke in which a patient tells a doctor, “It hurts when I do this,” and the doctor’s cure is “Don’t do this.” If you keep sending work to a magazine and they keep rejecting you, stop sending to them.
Write a lot, read a lot, and set the poems aside for a day or longer. Don’t reread them right away, tempting as that is. Come back to them after your head is cleared. Sometimes revision is as simple as re-breaking the lines in a different form--putting a free verse poem in three-lined stanzas with stepped indents, say, or couplets. Sometimes long poems benefit from breaks headed by Roman numerals. Often it helps to cut phrases that set up images for the reader, and present the images unmediated. Perhaps at its most basic, revision is simply choose your best lines in the poem, and cutting the rest. I sometimes give myself assignments, as they help me set aside your assumptions about what you think you mean in a poem, and let the language find the meaning for me. It’s a good sign when a poem ends on a note that makes me slightly uncomfortable or that I am not entirely sure about.
The House Makeover
After having generated individual poems, having used the tools of a writing buddy and writing group, and having tried some of the simple revision approaches above, it’s time to think about how your poems might all fit together in a book. Simply putting together in sequence the poems you’ve written over a period of time is not going to be enough to hold a book together. A poetry book should be greater than the sum of its parts. However, it’s also possible to stray too far in the other direction, the themed poetry book, where every piece adheres to an overarching conceit; these can end up feeling forced and gimmicky. Context is more than we think it is. Some poems play better at public readings than they do in books. Live with it. Don’t expect the book to be more than it can be, or to be everything forever. When you put the book together, other poems may shoulder ahead in that setting. Good. Sometimes themed books try too hard. In their desperation to accommodate the negative press that poetry sales get, poets try to write poetry books that masquerade as something else—as nonfiction, as research, as novels. Sometimes it works. But other times, if the individual pieces can’t stand on their own, it is an empty exercise.
Balance
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot describes the poet as a conduit for formulating universal experiences and emotions. This suggests an interesting tension between the public and the private. The poet uses the specifics of his experience to phrase ideas that readers recognize as familiar. There is just enough “personality” in the poem to help the reader understand the poem. Inspired by Eliot, such New Critics as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom, valued paradox and irony, which they interpreted as embodying dynamic tension, a push-pull, which, they assumed, worked itself out in a poem to achieve organic unity.
Poetry often deals with scary, dark, angry, volatile subjects. How poets deal with tough subjects is a good indicator of character. Nothing kills a book faster than sentiment, especially easy, solipsistic, narcissistic sentiment. It’s like knowing how far to go too far, being true to your work while also being ethical—it’s a balance that’s different for every writer. Like the television designers who distribute “punches of color” throughout a neutral room, structuring a poetry manuscript is all about balance. As an editor I like manuscripts that have a sense of progress to them. They function almost like logical arguments: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or like syllogisms: major premise plus minor premise equals conclusion.
Poetry is so often about language, about how we know what we know and how we know what we don’t know. I like manuscripts that find genuine dilemmas, eternal riddles in the human character or human situation, and that find an engine for attaining glimpses of solutions or escape. It’s much easier to structure a book once you have a pile of writing to work with, so think about how you would present your poetic “argument,” and start dividing into sections. Three sections at least, five at the maximum. Use your writing buddy and your writing group as sounding boards. Don’t ask them to do it for you, expecting that they have memorized all your poems. Show them the manuscript and contents page you’ve created and ask for their feedback.
Collaboration
When you get your book accepted, you are going to work with an editor. The dynamic here is different from working with your peers, but there is nothing to fear. Your editor will want to earn your trust as much as you will want to win his approval. An editor, whether he realizes it or not, counts on you to be true to the work above all—that’s your job. That doesn’t mean digging in your heels and fighting him at every turn. It does mean impartially filtering all his comments and learning from them as a result. You can’t just say, “Well, I disagree,” and leave it at that. You need to respond, and then he needs to respond to your responses, so keep it on a higher plane, for the good of the work.
Here again is the part where I turn to the camera and offer trade secrets. As a poetry editor working on a manuscript I had acquired, I would first write a detailed revision memo to the author. I’d include a few paragraphs where I phrased what I thought the strengths and focus of the manuscript were—I would say back to the author, in my words, what I thought his manuscript said. Then I gave her point by point line edits, sometimes changing the forms of poems, often reordering the sequence of poems, asking for cuts, suggesting additions. The author would read and think about my comments—sometimes we’d talk about it in person if she lived nearby, sometimes over the phone, over email. Then she would revise and resend the whole manuscript to me, usually with my letter sent back and their answers included.
I would read this manuscript again, and I often had a follow-up letter asking for more revisions or more clarification. My general sense was, I would go to the mat for some changes, but if after three rounds we weren’t budging, I’d accept that the writer must know best. There would be some give and take. Sometimes I simply was asking questions from a reader’s perspective—maybe I just didn’t understand something, and a simple answer would clear it up for me. Sometimes my questions were from an editor’s perspective—I really felt that a change needed to happen. As far as responses go, they were generally compliant. I admired it when they spoke up out of a sense of artistic integrity, and I do feel like the revision process goes both ways.
Once you’ve generated a manuscript, you can start revising for structure. As agents say on the television design shows, three things are important in real estate: location, location, location. Think of your manuscript as real estate. Some corners are better than others. Put key poems in key positions. Firsts and lasts are important. The first and last poem of each section as well as of the book should be distinctive, representative, and expressive of the larger section. Put at least one of your best poems near the front, and save at least one of your best poems for the end. Please also be wary of the “proem,” the poem set off at the beginning of a manuscript. This fad is over. Think also in terms of furniture and function, and group like with like. Place the living room poems together, the bedroom poems together, etc. Think of your manuscript as a blueprint for a house, the sketch a designer shows on a television program. Place the rooms in order and fill in the best ways to get from one to another, and fill in the poems that help do that. Write new poems if needed. Revision, the workhorse of writing, the heavy lifting we do so often in private, is as rife with opportunities for creativity as is inspiration, the spark that starts it all, and deserves to be conducted out in the open.
Leaving our preconceptions behind, we should never regard revision as change for change’s sake. When our friends describe our new decor as “different,” or “interesting,” we know, for instance, that they are not being complimentary. A good reviser also knows when to stop. The children’s book author Holly Hobbie described this in her memoir, The Art of Holly Hobbie:
When I get going on a painting, I enter a kind of work trance, as I think of it. That’s necessary, but it can also lead to a state of temporary blindness, in which I can overwork a small painting to death—the life of it smothered by labor. It is essential for me to get away from a painting in order to see what I’m doing. When I can’t leave something alone, it usually means I’ve already ruined it. That’s torture for me as well as for my art. You must know when to stop. That is very satisfying, the feeling you have stopped at the right time.
The law of diminishing returns applies to writers as it does to artists. In seventh grade art class, I used to erase through the paper as I tried and retried to sketch a portrait accurately. The final product didn’t benefit from my dedication.
After we bought our house in 2000, my partner and I also regularly watched Trading Spaces, a TLC cable program in which neighbors worked with designers on a $2,000 budget to redo their homes, frequently with unfortunate results. One makeover included ripping paper grocery bags and gluing the scraps to the walls, but the worst came when a designer created a “focal wall” out of live moss. I hoped the residents didn’t have allergies. To my mind, none of these homeowners objected loudly enough. As an editor, the writers I admire most have been the ones who push me to give them more feedback, who don’t just dutifully respond to a list of requests, but who go above and beyond, surprising me with the results. Where they find the energy, let alone the insight, is a mystery, but a pleasant one. I’d rather have them engage in a dialogue throughout the process than label the results “absolute crap” at the end.
A television promo shows the resolutely upbeat Josh Temple walking into a home improvement store with arms outstretched, saying, “Who wants to take me home?” Somehow he manages to convince unsuspecting homeowners who came in to buy a new doorknob or a light fixture to sign over their property to him temporarily for a massive makeover. Most willingly agree. My favorites are the California couple who questioned his every move—sure, the premise of the show requires complete acceptance, but this is San Francisco, man—does he know what this property is worth? Even with the much-contested black iron panels on the wall behind the gas fireplace, the finished room was still an improvement. So, in the midst of all the standard advice of be true to yourself, stand up for your principles, etc., don’t forget that “yourself” is a more capacious realm than is generally evident, and sometimes the end results benefit from heeding the words of others, whether they come from a licensed contractor, interior designer, or book editor.
Publishing is a process that happens in real time. Decisions are made on deadlines (or near them) and we all live with the outcome, which is the final “reveal.” As the program nears the end, a montage of satisfying scenes inspires comfort—the designer’s hands plumping pillows on a sofa, stroking the pleat of a drape, placing a vase of flowers on a table. Whatever doubts or angst or second guesses or afterthoughts riddled the process, or any disagreements or miscommunications or disappointments surfaced in discussions, disappear like magic by the end. For everyone involved, holding that finished book is a reward like no other. Well, perhaps it is a little like the the end of a cable TV design program, when dissonant chords shift into harmonic twinkles, the portable stage lights shimmer upon brand new fabrics, fixtures, and finishes, the homeowner buckles in a paroxysm of pleasure and gratitude, and the designer stretches her lips across a blazing smile.
Sources
Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, Fifth Edition, Longman, 2011.
Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, Graywolf, 2009.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood, Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Methune, 1920.
Holly Hobbie, The Art of Holly Hobbie: Drawing on Affection, Random House, 1986.
David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, Harper, 2011
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James Cihlar is the author of the poetry books Rancho Nostalgia (Dream Horse Press, 2013), Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008), and the chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010). His writing appears in American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Lambda Literary Review, Smartish Pace, Court Green, Mary, and Forklift, Ohio. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.