Revision (part 1)
Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau's Writing Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) has two chapters on the revision process. I find this textbook a great resource in learning the craft of poetry. Chapter 10, "Revising (I): Both Ends of the Pencil," deals with the idea of revision as a process that helps poets clarify the inchoate ideas in their first draft. Wallace and Boisseau discusses four methods poets can use to flesh out these insights: exploring, trying out, shaping, and working with titles. These methods help poets identify or discover unexplored pathways the poem can explore until it leads them to a possible insight or revelation. Chapter 11, "Revising (II): Seven-eighths of the Iceberg," tackles the finer points of the revision process: tightening, focusing, and testing. These techniques, when mastered, allow poets to display their artistry while concealing the craft that went into its making. As Wallace and Boisseau quotes Ernest Hemingway: "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water" (318).
 Mastering these methods and techniques doesn't come easy. We become adept at revising our own works through practice. Wallace and Boisseau cites several poets who continuously revise their pieces through a considerable period of time or even after these have been published. There really is some truth in Horace's dictum to put away our works for nine years (or at least enough time to let us read our draft with eyes fresh) before attempting to assess their worth.
We should keep in mind that our first draft is really just that -- a draft. Rare is the occasion when we are (or rare the breed who is) able to roll out a finished work in one sitting. It is more common for poets to labor over their poems. When we adopt this attitude, we are able to recognize what our drafts lack. We are then ready to explore its possibilities. Sometimes it's instinct that tells us something is not right with our draft. Other times it's a word or a phrase that doesn't make sense or seems off tangent. If we're lucky we are "divinely inspired" with a few lines that start us off on a path. Either way, we are ready to investigate where the lines of our draft will lead us -- what ideas or revelations will it yield.
Perhaps the best way to explain this exploration is through an example of my revision process. I wrote about revising "Garden Jungle" for an article published in the Silliman Journal 45.1 (2004): On a visit to the metropolis back in 1988, I stayed at Marj Evasco'’s home. She lives in a townhouse in Mandaluyong City that has become a haven for several kindred probinsiyano/probinsiyana caught in the city'’s grind. I was witness to how several of her friends who come from the Visayas would often gather in her tiny front garden. Sitting or lying on a mat in that garden with its bamboo grove, they would be transported back to the idyllic province in their minds. On one such night, I realized that what I was seeing could be a poem. Even as I listened to the conversation and sipped wine with that night’'s company, my mind was looking at this idea from several angles.
A year passed before I wrote down the first draft of the poem. Before that time, I had put away the idea that had been overtaken by more pressing concerns. It was just there, tucked away somewhere in my mind. The idea would sometimes pop up and I would play around with it in my mind. But I do not recall really thinking about it that much. Then while writing to a friend in Manila, the idea suddenly flashed in my head -- and it came complete with an image. At that instant I knew how to put together the poem. It would definitely have the bamboo grove as its central image. I latched onto this image because on a later visit to Marj's place, I almost could not find her house because the front garden was gone. But it was not gone, really.  Marj's father had recently come over from Bohol for a few weeks’ visit. During his stay, he had replanted the bermuda grass and had laid out a pebbled and winding path from the street to the front door. He had also pruned the lush bamboo grove and lashed together the topmost and slender stalks so it would form an arch diagonally across the small front yard. Marj's father, who had taught her how to look for beauty in nature, had designed the arch like a bridge that would carry the moon as it made its way across the sky. So there was the poem in the making. All that was left for me to do was to write it down, which I did originally in my first language (Waray) and then translating it into English:
Somehow I did not feel right with that draft, which dealt with loss and the garden growing wild because of neglect. I would sometimes go over that draft in my mind, or not think about it at all. Then while on a long bus ride one time, it all came to me: with no pen or paper on me I revised the draft in my head. And when I reached home, I typed down the revised lines of the draft and fine-tuning it along the way to its final version.
That description of the poem's genesis does not fully account for the conscious, but more often subconscious, process of deciding how to write each line. It does not also tell us how I came to the final two “apocalyptic” lines that are really just prepared for by the preceding lines. But that defining bus ride offers a clue. Sitting in such confined space over a period of time, and staring out the window without really seeing the passing scenery, provided me the luxury of meditation. Once the thought of that first draft came to mind, I was able to look at it closely and yet from an aesthetic distance. I came to recognize the poem’s insight. Loss thus becomes an active taming of the garden, and the “garden growing wild” is only suggested at in the final poem.
There is quite a leap from the first to the final version of this poem. The idea of loss due to neglect becomes the active "owning" of the garden -- a turn occasioned by my recollection of what first inspired me to write the poem. With this idea suddenly open to me, it became apparent that I should write just the opposite of what appeared in the first draft. Thus, planning and maintaining a garden becomes the dominant action in the final version.
It also dawned on me that there is some sense of artifice in making a garden, especially in plotting out a personal "oasis" in the city. In the final version, therefore, the natural sound of bird song in the first draft becomes the chimes "filling / spaces we have made our own." With these ideas written down in the first 11 lines, I struggled how to incorporate the idea of loss in the poem. Then it struck me: maintaining a garden means weeding it. There it was then, the final two lines that would complete the poem. Wallace and Boisseau also point to "trying out" and "shaping" as methods that will help us revise our drafts. These methods simply involve trying out words, phrases, and lines as we explore the ideas we laid out in our drafts. It seems that we are often dissatisfied with certain words or phrases, and so we try out other words and other combinations of words as we flesh out to our satisfaction what we began.
In trying out new combinations, we sometimes realize how another word or phrase reveals exactly what it was we wanted in the first place. This is what happened in writing "Garden Jungle." It wasn't really the loss I wanted to write about, after all, but the impermanence of fortune and life. In trying out different ways of saying this idea (there were several drafts to this poem), I was also trying different "shapes" for the poem -- cutting a line here, dropping a word to the next line, etc. The shaping part also helped me "see" how the poem would mean to readers. I had the last two lines of the final version as another stanza, but then decided to group them with the rest of the lines as it seemed "too dramatic" a revelation that way. Finally, Wallace and Boisseau mentions "titling" as still another way of finalizing the composition of our drafts.
They give us several ways by which titles can help us clarify our ideas. Titles, according to Wallace and Boisseau (299-302):
They advice that the title is best when particular rather than generic. Wallace and Boisseau say that the generic title -- like "Jealousy" or "Hope" -- might not be able to deliver what it promises. Next is Revision II, the more technical part of the revision process.  | Topics
Links Revision I is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.  |
