Avoidance seems to work for me. Last night, I thought the weekend would be about Ursula and her knitting, but today that seemed too hard to think through, so I pulled up a poem that was almost done last time we met.
Again, who picked out the brilliance to leave all the crap?
I wrote it the semester I took a class on form. The only real rule on this one is seven syllables to the line. As with the sonnet, I noticed a lot of flab (irrelevant detail, needless repetition, pacing issues). I was going for a feeling of frantic chaos that encircles a core of overwhelming isolation.
Emotionally, the poem is successful, but on a literal level the action is hard to follow. The language is vague; the images develop the mood, not the actual situation; and the lack of substance weakens the impact of the close.
The second I stopped reading, I started to revise. First it was fairly superficial stuff, cutting flabby words to fuse lines, but quickly I discovered I was adding detail, filling out the story of the poem, giving it the life of setting and of character motivation. The biggest thing is that I rediscovered it’s about the significance of losing a poem that wrote itself. I remember starting with that idea, but somewhere along the way, I lost it.
The changes go into the major overhaul category: whole stanzas will disappear to be replaced by others, and new characters and a new sense of what is missing will be added.
What does work well in the version of the poem as it stands is the use of nonflab related repetition. A few of the images and lines come up two or three times, evoking some of the circular unease of a villanelle. I’ll try to keep that aspect of the poem. I’m excited.
