POEMS AND GRADES IN ENGL 204/D. MIRANDA
1. refer to the syllabus for poem criteria in my grading process (i.e., what I am looking for in a student’s poem).
2. here is the general procedure for revision and grades:
· Bring a solid rough draft to workshop in class
· receive comments from peers and myself
· revise poem on your own or with peer(s), let it rest, revise again* (see #3)
· at the midterm mark, give me revised drafts of all poems completed to that point; schedule a conference with me to go over them; receive ‘fake grades’ for each poem. This is the grade the poem would receive if turned in as is.
· Revise again. Meanwhile, continue working on and revising the poem assignments from the second half of the semester. On the Monday of the last week of the term, turn in just those 2nd half poems, revised, for me to review; schedule a conference with me about them. Revise all poems again.
· Turn in all poems (plus major revisions of each poem) in your portfolio during finals week for your final, ‘real’ grade.
3. *Form revision groups outside of class! Partner up with someone whose work you admire or whose comments during workshop are especially useful. Run rough drafts and revisions by each other via email or over coffee! Give each other good feedback, or just encouragement to keep working. Writing is at once a solitary task, and a communal task. Be sure to get a little of both in your writing experience.
NOTE: you may conference with me about any of your poems at any time in the semester, during my regular office hours, or by appointment. The two conferences (one at midterm, one last week of term) are the only REQUIRED conferences.
Revision may well be the toughest part of writing. Read what Pulitzer Prize winning poet Donald Hall has to say about it, in the interview "Flying Revision's Flag." Here are a few of my favorite bits of advice/insight from that interview:
How do you decide when to stop revising? Can one revise too much?
Difficult question. Galway Kinnell believes that one can revise too much; I'm not certain that I can. Sometimes I worry that I may change a word simply because, having stared at it for five years, I'm bored with it. Sometimes I fear that I keep the poems at home because I don't want them to grow up and go away to school. Mostly I think I do the right thing by keeping them around, tinkering and tinkering.
To try drawing a reasonable template: At first the poem is volatile and changeable in the extreme; from time to time it slows down and stops. When it stops and will not move again, I show it to Jane and to other friends, and either they tell me to leave it alone, or they show me errors, which I change, or they make demands upon the poem that seem irrelevant to its identity. I finish the poem, with the help of my friends, publish it, it comes out in a magazine--and when the magazine arrives in the mail I tinker with the poem some more.
What do you want to accomplish when you revise? Obviously, you hope to improve the poem, to discover its ideal shape or expression. Would you describe specific goals?
I guess I can't describe goals other than the ones you mention. I'm not discovering "its ideal shape" exactly. I used to think that the statue was there inside the stone and I needed only carve down to it. Now I understand that new things come into the poem during revision . . . Poems are ongoing improvisations toward goals we identify when we arrive at them.
Is revision necessary for poetry? Should every poet revise?
Every poet should revise. Revision is not necessary for every poem. It's been necessary for every poem of mine--but I believe the testimony of some poets (and the evidence of manuscripts) that some great poems have arrived spontaneously, or almost spontaneously. Keats seems to have written great poems in a sitting. I find it hard to believe that Allen Ginsberg doesn't revise, as he sometimes claims. I don't want to believe it! . . . but it does happen, to other poets.
And finally, this great quote:
How can you make yourself revise if you don't want to, if your temperament works against your inclinations to revise? Should the poet force himself to revise?
Sure. If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
And what do other poets and writers say about revision???
Truman Capote: "I believe more in the scissors than in the pencil."
Naomi Shihab Nye: "Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!"
Georgia Heard: "To revise is a poet's life. To see and then to see again is what a poet's life is all about. I revise my poems not for the sake of revising, but to clarify what I see with my eyes and what's in my heart."
Nikki Grimes: "Good poetry requires a great deal of revision! Most of my poems go through ten drafts, minimum. (Groan.) That said, if you don't write honestly, no one will care what your poem has to say, no matter how cleverly written or technically competent it is."
Adam Ford: "It's always exciting when a poem tumbles straight from your head onto the page, but sometimes it still needs a little extra work. It's a rare poem whose first draft is as good as it could ever be."
Ben Hurst: “When you revise a poem, you take the rough edges of a diamond and you polish them to the point that someone [else] can plainly see the clarity of the raw material.”
Georgia Heard: "To revise is a poet's life. To see and then to see again is what a poet's life is all about. I revise my poems not for the sake of revising, but to clarify what I see with my eyes and what's in my heart."
Nikki Grimes: "Good poetry requires a great deal of revision! Most of my poems go through ten drafts, minimum. (Groan.) That said, if you don't write honestly, no one will care what your poem has to say, no matter how cleverly written or technically competent it is."
Adam Ford: "It's always exciting when a poem tumbles straight from your head onto the page, but sometimes it still needs a little extra work. It's a rare poem whose first draft is as good as it could ever be."
Ben Hurst: “When you revise a poem, you take the rough edges of a diamond and you polish them to the point that someone [else] can plainly see the clarity of the raw material.”
Bobbi Katz: "Be prepared to revise. And revise. And revise."
Mark Doty: "I learn about new poems in the process of reading aloud. You listen differently when you're reading to an audience - it's as if part of you is in that audience listening to that new poem. You hear weaker lines, glitches, rhythmic problems, and that helps in the revision process.”
Mark Doty: "I learn about new poems in the process of reading aloud. You listen differently when you're reading to an audience - it's as if part of you is in that audience listening to that new poem. You hear weaker lines, glitches, rhythmic problems, and that helps in the revision process.”
Josephine Jacobson. “I hate revision. It’s a labor I loathe but I practice it always . . . because the poem that you read a month after you’ve written it, is not the poem that you think you’ve written. You think 'what! Somebody has come in the middle of the night and tampered with my work of genius. This can’t possibly be what I wrote.' Because things spring to your eye that you should have seen at first and didn’t; and so though I dislike revision intensely -- It’s like operating on somebody while they’re alive -- I do practice it always before I let a poem go on its own, for better or worse.”
Billy Collins: “One thing I’ve told my poetry students is that revision should always be taking away. Always be taking away. No, don’t add a new stanza. Don’t stuff a stanza in the middle, because you lose this organic flow. So knowing what to leave out is very important…”
Lillian Moore: "I tend to write poems slowly because I enjoy seeking the right word and revising until I think I have it. For almost every poem I have written over the years there has probably been a wastebasket filled with rough drafts. Most of all, I want a poem to say what I really felt or saw or heard--that is, to be true."
QUICK & DIRTY REVISION STRATEGIES:
MURPHY’S STYLE SHEET FOR REVISING POETRY
[also works well for critiquing rough drafts!]
by Peter E. Murphy (with adaptations by Deborah Miranda)
1. Cliché
Eliminate clichés, which are the vermin of imaginative writing. Initially fresh images, clichés have been taken over and made mundane by too frequent usage. They have lost their original authority, power, and beauty. They raise their predictable heads (!) in the early drafts of even the most experienced writers. Turning a cliché against itself by intentionally using it in an inverted form can revive it. Puns can give a cliché a renewed life. However, if a poem is merely going to repeat a cliché, cut it. If you are very attached to a certain cliché in a certain poem, try this: freewrite on what it is that the cliché expresses that appeals so much to you. Chances are you’ll come up with your own fresh image that blows the cliché out of the water.
Eliminate clichés, which are the vermin of imaginative writing. Initially fresh images, clichés have been taken over and made mundane by too frequent usage. They have lost their original authority, power, and beauty. They raise their predictable heads (!) in the early drafts of even the most experienced writers. Turning a cliché against itself by intentionally using it in an inverted form can revive it. Puns can give a cliché a renewed life. However, if a poem is merely going to repeat a cliché, cut it. If you are very attached to a certain cliché in a certain poem, try this: freewrite on what it is that the cliché expresses that appeals so much to you. Chances are you’ll come up with your own fresh image that blows the cliché out of the water.
2. Abstract
Identify all abstract or general nouns and replace them with concrete or specific ones. Words like "love," "freedom," "pain," "sadness," "anger," and other emotions and ideas need to be channeled through the physical imagery of the five senses: Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste. A caveat: carefully chosen,well-timed abstracts can be okay. Natalie Goldberg says, “You have to earn the right to make an abstract statement. You earn this right by using the concrete bricks of detail. After much original detail, you can take a little leap, step away, and make a statement: ‘Ah, yes, life is good,’ or ‘Life sucks.’ But you can’t say ‘Life sucks’ until you have given us a picture of it: a man lying in the gutter, mosquitoes feeding at his open sores, the tongue of his right shoe hanging out, his pockets turned inside out, his eyes stunned close, and his skin a pale yellow.”
Identify all abstract or general nouns and replace them with concrete or specific ones. Words like "love," "freedom," "pain," "sadness," "anger," and other emotions and ideas need to be channeled through the physical imagery of the five senses: Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Taste. A caveat: carefully chosen,well-timed abstracts can be okay. Natalie Goldberg says, “You have to earn the right to make an abstract statement. You earn this right by using the concrete bricks of detail. After much original detail, you can take a little leap, step away, and make a statement: ‘Ah, yes, life is good,’ or ‘Life sucks.’ But you can’t say ‘Life sucks’ until you have given us a picture of it: a man lying in the gutter, mosquitoes feeding at his open sores, the tongue of his right shoe hanging out, his pockets turned inside out, his eyes stunned close, and his skin a pale yellow.”
3. Verbs
Fortify the physical character of the poem by using strong action verbs instead of linking verbs in the passive voice (i.e., “she runs” rather than “she is running”). Because active verbs and concrete nouns are more visceral, dynamic, and persuasive, they reduce the need for modifiers. Avoid overusing the "-ing" form of verbs because it dilutes and reduces their strength. It is like driving a speedboat without raising the anchor. When you sense that a poem is good but still not capturing the intensity of what you want to convey, try making a list of all your verbs. Evaluate them: are they up to the job? do they drag too many anchors? are there more original verbs than the ones you are using? have you chosen verbs that are too complex for the imagery? Verbs literally get your poem up and running. Make sure it’s not stumbling over verbs that don’t fit or can’t keep up.
Fortify the physical character of the poem by using strong action verbs instead of linking verbs in the passive voice (i.e., “she runs” rather than “she is running”). Because active verbs and concrete nouns are more visceral, dynamic, and persuasive, they reduce the need for modifiers. Avoid overusing the "-ing" form of verbs because it dilutes and reduces their strength. It is like driving a speedboat without raising the anchor. When you sense that a poem is good but still not capturing the intensity of what you want to convey, try making a list of all your verbs. Evaluate them: are they up to the job? do they drag too many anchors? are there more original verbs than the ones you are using? have you chosen verbs that are too complex for the imagery? Verbs literally get your poem up and running. Make sure it’s not stumbling over verbs that don’t fit or can’t keep up.
4. Compress
Cut, compress, and condense! Delete conjunctions, articles, excess pronouns, ‘so,’ ‘very,’ ‘because,’ and so on. Make every word count. Imagine that you must pay your reader a dollar a word to read your prose. Then, imagine that you must pay your reader five dollars a word to read your poetry. Compress, especially when the progress of the poem is impeded by imprecise or indecisive language. Cut everything that can be cut until what's left penetrates the flesh with its sweet, burning flavor. Most poets tend to fall in love with our own words; that’s why we’re poets. Remember: if you cut it, and the poem doesn’t work, you can always add it back in. Save all your drafts. After any major cuts, put the draft away and look at it in a few days, a week, or even later, to see how the cut ‘heals’ – the poem can actually grow during such a rest period, while your vision expands.
Cut, compress, and condense! Delete conjunctions, articles, excess pronouns, ‘so,’ ‘very,’ ‘because,’ and so on. Make every word count. Imagine that you must pay your reader a dollar a word to read your prose. Then, imagine that you must pay your reader five dollars a word to read your poetry. Compress, especially when the progress of the poem is impeded by imprecise or indecisive language. Cut everything that can be cut until what's left penetrates the flesh with its sweet, burning flavor. Most poets tend to fall in love with our own words; that’s why we’re poets. Remember: if you cut it, and the poem doesn’t work, you can always add it back in. Save all your drafts. After any major cuts, put the draft away and look at it in a few days, a week, or even later, to see how the cut ‘heals’ – the poem can actually grow during such a rest period, while your vision expands.
5. Risk
Be daring in your writing. Experiment and take chances. Risk-taking adds originality and spontaneity to the poem, which leads to imaginative and linguistic breakthroughs. When you refuse risk, you refuse the possibility that language, and not your own brilliance, is in control of imagery. Risk applies to the content of a poem as well as to the form, style, tone, or other technical aspect. Monitor your internal editor: if she starts to say, “Oh, you don’t want to write about THAT” or “isn’t that a little ugly/too personal/embarrassing/scary?” – then go for it. You’re about to hit a vein of potentially explosive creativity. It may or may not result in a great poem. But it will definitely feed you as a writer.
Be daring in your writing. Experiment and take chances. Risk-taking adds originality and spontaneity to the poem, which leads to imaginative and linguistic breakthroughs. When you refuse risk, you refuse the possibility that language, and not your own brilliance, is in control of imagery. Risk applies to the content of a poem as well as to the form, style, tone, or other technical aspect. Monitor your internal editor: if she starts to say, “Oh, you don’t want to write about THAT” or “isn’t that a little ugly/too personal/embarrassing/scary?” – then go for it. You’re about to hit a vein of potentially explosive creativity. It may or may not result in a great poem. But it will definitely feed you as a writer.
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