Drafts
In our series Drafts, we invite poets to explore strategies for writing and rewriting the poem, its many lives, before (and even after) it is published.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
This is an essay on revising a poem that has no value to anyone. I have no advice to give. You cannot keep your friend alive in your poems. You can grieve your friend in poems and find your way back to certain feelings, and so, momentarily, grief might stand side by side with elation and longing. Isn’t there an ashtray suddenly there? I read the poem recently during a classroom visit, a student had requested it, and what I felt as I read was not the return I so wanted when first drafting the poem but a vast and gaping absence blooming inside my body.
Catch Up on Issues of What Sparks Poetry
This is an essay on revising a poem that has no value to anyone. I have no advice to give. You cannot keep your friend alive in your poems. You can grieve your friend in poems and find your way back to certain feelings, and so, momentarily, grief might stand side by side with elation and longing. Isn’t there an ashtray suddenly there? I read the poem recently during a classroom visit, a student had requested it, and what I felt as I read was not the return I so wanted when first drafting the poem but a vast and gaping absence blooming inside my body.
I must trust my process and my intuition. I must listen to sound and image and venture into roads the draft also clears for me, paths that, more than likely, I did not have the vision to see from the outset.
