Revising Your Poem: Four Ladders to the Next Level

So your poem is good.  Clever ending, a few cool metaphors.  Why isn't it getting accepted for publication?  Or making your loved ones dab their eyes and beg for a copy?

Now that I've published over fifty poems in journals and magazines, I'm starting to figure out why certain poems find a home and others sit in my files.  I'm also getting better at turning good poems into great ones.  When I want to polish up a poem, I reach for these four tools:

1) Voice:  Inject the poem with voice, baby!
We tend to start a poem using everyday language, then spruce it up with two or three figures of speech.  I call this the polka dot approach.  The poem is mostly plain with a few spots of color.  For a next-level poem, you want total coverage.  You want every word colorful.  Find places that use language in ordinary ways, then freshen them up with unusual word combinations.  Find places that sound -- let's just say it -- generic.  Punch up the personality.  Say it like only your imagination can.  Would your poem's speaker call clouds gauze or is she more of a cotton ball person?  Look at every blah phrase as a chance to rewrite and inject voice.

2) Adjective jacking:  Take 'em away!
"A bored-looking woman."  This is a phrase from a poem I'm working on this week.  I know it's weak because it makes the reader do all the work of imagining what "bored" looks like.  Instead of the adjective, "bored-looking," I need to use body language, action, or sensory detail.  I could try,

• a slouching woman  (body language)
• a snoring woman  (action)
• the woman rested her chin on one hand and stared into space, seeming to focus on the place where the wall met the ceiling (visual sensory detail)

Find the places in your poem where people or situations are described in one-word adjectives.  Replace these words with crunchier stuff.  Don't say she's obsessive.  Tell us she color-codes her To Do lists.

3) Gift for the Selfish Reader
News flash!  Readers care nothing about your experiences unless those experiences enlighten their own.  Your traumas, your joys, the loved one you lost, the new baby -- none of these are powerful enough on their own to make a great poem.  Maybe a good poem, but not a next-level-er.  What you need is a gift for the selfish reader.  Something for her to take away.  Great literature offers insights into life.  Next-level poems make readers feel that, having read your poem, they must look at life in a new way.  Examine your poem for the take-away.  You can think of this as your poem's mission statement.  You might not write it into the poem directly, but make all the elements of the poem serve this mission.  Decide what you want your poem to convey.  Remember that readers don't want to learn about the poet; they want to learn about themselves.

4) The Knife:  Cut a lot
While I love excess, overflow, and voluptuousness in some places, most poems are just plain flabby.  To make your poem lean and mean, remove throat-clearing openings and spell-it-all-out endings.  We tend to to "ramp up" rather than jump in.  We tend to explain the meaning of our poems to make sure the reader gets it.  Give your readers some credit; no need to hand-hold.  You can also cut "the" in many places.  Cut "of gold," and use "golden."  "Of " is a wordiness alarm!  Get rid of author commentary too -- noise-some parts in the middle that explain stuff.  Let the poem embody the message rather than preach it.  A warning: Don't let the knife cut out the heart of your piece, nor every bit of whimsy or flair.  Whatever adds to the poem should remain.  Whatever obscures your larger intent should go.

OK, writing this post has inspired me to go do something better with that "bored-looking woman."  Wish me luck!  And I wish it for you, too.

What the Judge is Looking For

A renovated warehouse + cookies + guitar music + people reading poems.  It adds up to a lovely evening at Trinity Valley Community College's Poetry Festival.  I just drove home from it, and I can report that the creative vibes of the evening are still with me!

To celebrate National Poetry Month, TVCC invites a poet to give a reading and judge their student poetry contest.  The top student poets receive recognition, and all the poems appear in a journal.  This year, I was honored to be their visiting poet and judge.  THANKS to everyone who made the event such a success!

As I listened to the winning poems tonight, I remembered the qualities that made me choose each one.  A great image here, a clever line there.  An unusual topic.  A musical cadence.  They sounded even better in person!

In the back of my mind, though, I also recalled poems that fell short of their potential.  Actually, I didn't recall the poems themselves, but the missteps that landed them in the "no" pile.  Any of the contest entries could have been great poems, but only a few stood out.  How did those few grab my attention?  I'll tell you.

A few weeks ago, a bulging envelope arrived, and I sat down with a two-inch stack of poems.  My assignment: whittle it down to ten.  In the first pass, I hoped to find
1) sensory language that made me imagine sights, sounds, smells, and taste
2) metaphors, simile, personification, or other figures of speech
3) interesting topic choice
4) concrete details
5) sound play beyond predictable rhymes

With this, I eliminated more than half.  Poems that used all abstractions or rhymed in a nursery way, I set aside immediately.  Poems about love (which was most of them!) got boring fast.  Very short and very long poems felt like drafts.

Next, I reread.  Now I looked for:
1) complex emotional situations
2) heft or gravitas in the issues raised by the poem
3) humor that made me laugh, but also revealed a new perspective
4) a strong voice that used fresh language
5) harsh situations articulated with harsh sounds, like "t" and "ck"
6) gentle situations articulated with gentle sounds like "sh" and "w"
7) meaningful line breaks
8) meaningful arrangement on the page and use of white space

This gave me a stack of about twenty.  I read a third time and a fourth.  Only a handful of these twenty revealed a little more every time.  Those turned out to be the winners.  Poems that kept me coming back.

I've judged about twenty contests in recent years, and I'm going to confess something:  There's no foolproof way to rank or even fairly compare equally solid poems.  Sometimes a clear "best one" emerges, but more often I'm left agonizing, trying to find a reason to choose one over another.  At this point, each judge will go with her gut.  For me, this means asking myself crazy stuff like which poem I would want a copy of or which poem I wish I had written.  I might feel pulled to poems that touch on experiences I've had or philosophies I agree with.  I might pick a poem that seems more novel and unusual or one that attempts something challenging.  It's just plain unpredictable.

But, this is comforting.  It means that your poem might be very good and still not take first place.  Once it's polished to shine as much as possible, you can relax and not worry so much about what the results mean.  I enter contests, too, and I'm going to try taking my own advice.

Meanwhile, I hope the students at tonight's Festival enjoyed themselves, win or lose.  Just the act of writing is life-affirming and worthwhile.  To all the writers in that room:  Stay creative and keep writing!