On Revision and Making Sense

I've just finished finished reading through all of your emails and your work, and I'm so excited to finally get into the meat of this class.

1. Some business, first. Please make sure that your weekly exercises are turned in to your Google drive, as I am all caught up on my grade book for now, and some of you have missing work. You can tell whether or not I've seen your exercises by looking for comments. I have commented on everything I've seen so far.

2. I wanted to take a moment to discuss some concerns and comments that I'm seeing pop up about the nature of this class. First, that it is a "revision-based" course, and what I am essentially asking you to do is to revise your existing body of work. I've picked a really down-to-earth and practical craft book to walk us through that. And I'm expecting you to take apart and analyze and re-see your poems every week. Some of you have voiced a bit of a protest over this approach, claiming that you simply don't revise your poems, and if you attempt to revise a poem, it only seems to get worse.

Sigh.

Okay, so I am not a professional poet, at least not at this point in my career. I've published a few poems in good journals, and I've taken several graduate-level poetry courses, but I have simply never considered myself a natural poet. My own poems have taken a huge amount of work and revision for them to reach a publishable state. My poems do not arrive like baby angels floating down from heaven, perfectly formed and ready to meet the world. That could just be me and my process, I suppose. But here's the thing. I know an awful lot of professional, published poets, and every single one of them revises their poems.

I tell my fiction students that revision is the difference between the amateurs and the professionals. The professionals revise, and when I say revise, I don't mean "furniture-dusting revision," in which the writer cleans up the sentence structure and moves a paragraph or two and checks the spelling. I mean, outside-the-box, wrecking-ball level revision. That is where the real work of fiction writing happens. This is where the real fun happens, too, the moments of play and experimentation and understanding.

Now I do understand that fiction is different from poetry. Revising poems should happen much more on a line by line level, checking the resonance of every line, the sound, the meaning, etc. . . But I would still make the argument that revision is what separates the amateurs from the professionals. A good way to gauge this is to spend some time on the website How A Poem Happens, which is a wonderful website I've been directing my poetry students to for years. The site has a published poet give us a previously-published poem, and then the organizer of the site (Brian Brodeur) asks the poet the same series of questions about how the poem came to be, the different stages it went through, and how and where it was published. If you wade through these hundreds of poets, you'll see that revision is a fundamental part of the process for most of them.

Which brings me to my next point:

3. I am always going to approach the writing of poetry (as I do the writing of fiction) from the practical standpoint of someone who wants to see you build a career as a writer and get your own work published in good journals. This means that I am generally going to push you to write/revise your poems to make sense to the reader.

I used to think that the purpose of poetry was to express my own personal experience, all the foundational memories and important life events and painful episodes, as a type of catharsis. Or it was to convey some abstract idea in as clever a way as I possibly could. I blame my study of the romantic poets for this, where each poem reads like a puzzle of vague and hidden meanings that the reader has to unlock, word by word, line by line, reference by reference.

Then I actually went out into the world, and nobody wanted to read all those ultra-personal or super convoluted poems. Let alone publish them.

This is not to say that those poems weren't important to me. They have great personal value. They DID provide an essential catharsis--they allowed me to voice my thoughts and feelings about the ups and downs of my life.

But they did not get published. Unless you are already a well established poet, most literary journals tend to take poems in which the meaning of the poem is clear.

Publishing is not, nor should it be, the goal of every writer. Maybe your goals as a poet are completely different, and that's fine. Maybe poetry for you is all about the art, the sound, the craft, the ideas, the feeling, and you aren't concerned with who will ultimately get to read the poems. That is completely acceptable.

But I am still going to be the voice who urges you to write for a much larger audience (or as large as an audience can get, with poetry, sigh, I wish more people read poetry). So I'm going to encourage you to write toward clarity, toward poems that the reader can understand without having to do a whole lot of work. This doesn't mean you have to become Ted Kooser, or write narrative poems, or write about subjects you don't want to write about. This doesn't mean your previous instructors, who might have had a different approach, were wrong or not looking out for your career, also. It just means that I am going to come at you from a practical standpoint. And I believe in the end that will be good for you, no matter where you decide to go from my class.

Anyway, that's my two cents. It's also an open discussion. Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and we will certainly discuss all of this when we meet for our first workshop. My advice would be, of course, to embrace this approach even if it's not how you're used to writing, because the more approaches that you learn, the more ways you study to come at your art, the more versatile and knowledgeable you will be as an artist. And then you can go write whatever you want.

It's all up to you.

Class

There's been confusion about whether or not we're having class today. We're not. We will only have physical class on the days when there are workshops. You all seem to want to meet in person, which is fine.

Our first workshop is February 13. Let's aim to have you show up at 10:30 at the Hemingway center and figure it out from there. Bring a laptop or print the poems everyone has posted.

Welcome!

Welcome to English 491: Senior Portfolio in Creative Writing, the POETRY edition.

I'm Cynthia Hand, the instructor for the course. See the Professor page for more information about me and how you can get in contact with me.

Take a few minutes to maneuver around this website—this is the cornerstone of the class, and you should read every bit of it and continue to check it obsessively all semester. I often post little extras--articles and resources I think will be helpful to you, so please check back often to make the most out of this class.

Then take a minute to purchase the book The Poets Home Repair Manual. It will not be available at the BSU bookstore, (because this course was assigned for me to teach so late in the process) so buy it now by clicking on the book in the column on your right. I’d prefer you to purchase the paperback copy, because we’ll be flipping though it a lot during class.

So, a little basic information about the course. In this class we will:

•   Revise! This class is all about revising the poems you’ve been working on in all of your poetry writing courses up to this point. While you are free to write entirely new poems for class if you feel the need to, this course is focused on revision. Over the next fifteen weeks you'll revise and workshop 15 poems, the goal being that at the end of the course you will have a high quality portfolio of your very best work. 

•   Read. At the end of this class you'll have read two collections of poetry, a book on the craft, and a book on revision, not including the unpublished poems you’ll read for workshop. Happily, these will largely be books you’ve chosen for yourself to suit your particular needs as a writer.  (Have you always wanted to read Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance or Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town? Now’s your chance.) 

Thanks for being so patient with the bumpy beginning for this class. 


I'm excited to read your work. Let's get to it, then!