SMARTHINKING Writer's Handbook

Chapter 1, Lesson 18
Writing Poems 2: Techniques and Revision

In this lesson you will learn about techniques that poets use and will learn some ways to use that knowledge to revise your own poem. To understand what a poem is and the different types of poems, you can refer to Writing Poems 1: What is a Poem and How Do I Start One

The Reviser

No one writes a perfect poem the first time: Elizabeth Bishop kept unfinished poems tacked to her walls for years, waiting for the right word to come to her. To revise your poem, you must be able to hear it with fresh ears. No, that doesn't mean that you need an ear transplant. It means that you need to figure out how to let go of your attachment to the poem.  Some of us hate everything we’ve written, and some of us love it all. We can be so in love with a poem so that we can't see what would make it better; sometimes we hate it so much that we can't see what is already good. Whichever way you lean, the key to writing a good poem is to give yourself a chance to look at the poem as if someone else had written it. Time is the best method — even a few days or a week can allow you to have a fresh perspective on a poem. But, along with time, you can use some other strategies to get new ears:

• Read it out loud.
• Read it backwards, line by line.
• Have someone else read it to you.
• Sing it.
• Play a drum to the rhythm of it.
• Print it out, then cut each line or stanza out of the paper and rearrange the pieces, try at least three different orderings and read each one out loud, looking for surprising and pleasing connections.
• Tack it to the wall by the place where you do homework so that you will see it periodically as you are thinking about other things

As you revise your poem, you need to have a sense of what to look for. Trust your gut as to whether something sounds good, but also think about the questions below. You can ask yourself these questions as you revise your poem, you can use them as you read your peers' work, and you can ask your peers and writing tutor to think about these issues as they consider your poem.

Is my language concrete? Do I show instead of just telling?

Concrete nouns are things that we can touch, see, smell, and taste: garlic, bamboo, a white t-shirt, a Bowie knife. Abstract nouns are intangible and tend to describe feelings or ideas: love, peace, anger, democracy, war. Sure, poems can be about abstract things, but the best poems talk about abstract things by using concrete nouns. When readers can see and feel the objects, they are more moved by the poem than they are by an abstract discussion of the idea.

Concrete nouns make your poems more alive, more interesting to your reader, and they allow you to show your readers the emotions that you want to convey. You want your reader to get as close to feeling as you can get, but saying "I missed her" won't do it. Think instead of an image that will let your reader sense sadness without having to be told about it: "The daisies she gave me had wilted in the vase. Limp leaves clung to the glass, abandoned by water. Each morning, more petals littered the countertop." Think of an image that conveys sadness or peace or grief or war or love or desire and use it to show your readers what matters in the poem.

Make a list of concrete nouns — twenty-five things that you can see, feel, and taste. Pick words that you like for their sound and image: coriander, coconut, velvet.

As you read over your list, think about each item on it— if you close your eyes, can you see it? If not, then it is probably not concrete. Pick the fifth, twelfth, thirteenth, eighteenth and twenty-first concrete nouns on your list. Write a twenty-five line poem using those words and three from the following list: bottlecap, macaw, recliner, pencil, horseshoe, moose. Pick either joy or loneliness as the emotion of your poem, but don't use any words that are typically associated with that subject. (That means no hearts or tears or smiles or sadness or happy or absence.)

How is my poem using the music of language?

Poetry is about using language to make music. It takes advantage of all the sound patterns in language: consonance (similar consonants), assonance (similar vowels), alliteration (same initial sounds) Assonance, Consonance, and Alliteration), and rhyme (similar word endings, like trance and glance, darkness in and discipline, daze and always). And it makes use of rhythmic patterns: meter (the patterns of stress in words) and repetition (the recurrence of phrases or sentence structures). The best way to get a feel for the musical patterns in your poem is to read it out loud. Pay attention to how it feels in your mouth. Does it sound and taste good? Could you tap your foot to it? Does the rhyme sound too obvious, the alliteration too much like an advertising jingle? 

One flaw to watch for in your poem's music is an over-reliance on –ing verbs. A lot of beginner poets think that the –ing sounds more poetic, but in fact, the –ing turns the verb into a noun. The verbs are all stopped; the only real action in the sentence is usually "was," which isn't much as action goes.

Revise the following sentence so that all of the verbs are active (not –ing).

Dancing and singing, I was running toward the gate.

[Our Example]: "As I ran toward the gate, I danced and sang." Yours may look very much like ours. The action is clearer and more active. In addition, once we remove the masking –ing endings, we see that the verbs we are using are not as interesting as we would like them to be. We have uncovered a need for revision. That's good news! As a poet, be excited when you realize that something needs changing and that you know how to go about it!

Music in poems also exists at the level of the sentence. Poetry allows writers to bend the rules of grammar in service of music and meaning, but that doesn't mean that the rule book can be pitched out the window! As you reread your poem, look for passive voice, run ons and comma splices, and sentence fragments just as you would in an essay. Then ask yourself, once you find these sentence structures, whether they serve a purpose. Does the fragment create a rhythm and lack of action that you want in your poem at that point and could not get with a complete sentence? If it does, then keep it. For example, you might want to keep the fragment in the line, "I stopped and stared. A dead bird." The dead bird lacks action, as does the speaker, so the sentence fragment fits with the movement of the poem. But— and this is important— don't just pitch the rulebook on a whim. Sentence structure matters. You have more choices than you do in an essay, but make sure that you make your choices for reasons.

Am I getting the most mileage out of my verbs and nouns?

Verbs and nouns are the backbone of a poem, and the stronger they are, the healthier your poem will be. One way to make sure that you get the most out of your nouns and verbs is to check your adjectives and adverbs. These descriptive words are our way of trying to make our nouns and verbs more specific, but frequently they are a signal that we need to rethink our nouns and verbs. If you write "walked slowly," you are using the adverb slowly to specify the pace at which the speaker walked. However, if you think of other, more specific verbs that mean "to walk slowly," then you may find words that can help you to tell us something specific about the emotions of the person who is walking slowly. Strolled, crept, prowled, stalked, shuffled, ambled, and sauntered are all verbs that suggest slow walking, but they imply very different attitudes. Is your walker arrogant? Then perhaps she sauntered. Annoyed? Then perhaps she stalked. Depressed? Shuffled. Carefree? Strolled or ambled.

The same principle applies to adjectives and nouns. Whenever you use an adjective, look at the word it modifies and try to think of specific words that could give you more bang for your noun. If you are describing a "big tree," could you use oak or redwood to give your reader a more specific picture? If a "beautiful bird" flew overhead, could you tell us that it was a hummingbird or Goss hawk? (Note: you may be thinking "I wouldn't know a Goss hawk from a hummingbird if it hit the window above my desk." It doesn't matter. Poems are about emotional and aesthetic experience, not about a completely accurate record of events. If you need a Goss hawk in your poem, put one there.) When your nouns and verbs are specific, your poems have more life and will have a greater impact on your readers.

 How many different ways can you think of to make the words “entered” and “left” more specific? When you're done click below  to compare your list with ours.

[Our Example]: Entered: burst in, slunk in, burrowed in. Left: stormed out, evaporated, fled.

You may have some words on your list that aren't on ours; we may have some that aren't on yours. That's fine. Everyone has her or his own way of phrasing things. That's part of what makes reading different writers interesting!

What moods are suggested by your revisions of entered and left? Are any of your verbs sorrowful? Ecstatic? Reluctant? Defiant? Hesitant? Determined? Oblivious?

As you revise, look over the nouns and verbs in your poem. What mood do you want your poem to have? Are your nouns and verbs creating that mood?

Let's look again at the sentence we revised in the last section: "As I ran toward the gate, I danced and sang." Now that we've revised the sentence to remove the –ings, we know that the sentence still needs more work. We need more specific verbs and nouns to make our sentence more dynamic. Can you think of other verbs to use in the sentence that will be more specific actions?

[Our Example] Since we know that our verbs and nouns need some work, we might write, "I hummed 'Hi Ho Hi Ho' as I skipped out the gate to meet Grace." Notice that we've gotten rid of the echo of the –ing and replaced it with the consonance of "out," "gate," and "meet" and the alliteration of "hummed" and "Hi Ho Hi Ho" and "gate" and "Grace." We've improved the line in two ways: those patterns of repetition are subtler— and therefore more pleasing— than the repeated -ings in the original, and we've made the action more interesting!

Are my images working as hard as I want them to?

With all this talk of concrete language and verbs and nouns, it should come as no surprise that images, the pictures painted in language, are crucial to your poem. As poets, we like to compare things to each other through simile and metaphor, using the second thing to tell us something new about the first. Go for it!

• A simile compares two things to each other using "like" or "as": "The sun sprang over the horizon like an Olympic hurdler."
• A metaphor emphasizes the similarities between two things without resorting to "like" or "as": "The sun launched itself over the horizon and detonated in my flowerbed, shattering the night with zinnias." In the Exercise you did in the previous lesson you used a place as a metaphor for a person who raised you.

The comparisons that we draw between things give our poems their tone and let our readers know what our concerns are. Frequently, we can't even express certain ideas without a metaphor or simile! We can't, for example, just say that sadness is like sadness; we need to compare sadness to something else in order to understand it.

Two aspects of image are particularly important to successful poems.

• Avoiding clichés.
• Making sure that your images work together.

A cliché is an idea or image that has been overused and has become dull and predictable. Some examples of clichés include comparing beauty to a flower or something smooth to glass, describing rage as "seeing red" or youth as innocence. Clichés make your writing less interesting and less expressive. As you reread your poem, keep an eye out for clichés and eliminate them.

We all know a slew of clichés about color. We've heard "emerald green" and "white as snow" so many times that we barely even think about the image. But you want your readers to think and to be surprised. Compare "emerald green" to "construction cone orange"! The second is a new image, one that surprises us. In the box below, pick a color and write as many ways as you can think of to describe it. Don't worry at first about whether your images are clichés, but after you have finished the list, go back through it and pick out the most surprising and original descriptions from your list.

[Our Example]: How did you do? Did you come up with one or two new ways of describing your color? Our list included: arresting red, sleep-starved pink, green as a gated neighborhood, a deep shade of yolk. Notice that all of these descriptions of color are, in fact, metaphors. They compare the color to something else.

Writing a poem involves a process of creation and revision. As you create, try to let your mind be as wild as you can. Let yourself explore, be weird, surprise yourself. Later, as you revise, think about how your poem could be even better. How could it be more original? How could it more fully express the emotional and aesthetic experience that you are trying to capture?  In this lesson, you learned some of the techniques writers use to help them revise poems and you looked at some of the issues you will want to bear in mind as you revise your own poems. Use those tools as you revise; and make your own poetry tools. As you play with your poems, you will keep coming up with new ideas for ways to put words together to make meaning. Whatever you do, keep playing!