Drafts
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
An epigraph is a kind of capture that is also a kind of release. Lines from someone’s poem leave a mark on you, and you set out to respond to them. Or you discover lines that chime uncannily with something you’ve written, and juxtapose the two. Is this trespass or tribute? It may seem that two or three lines is a small and respectful borrowing. And yet implicitly you take possession through the connections you establish between another person’s words and your own. The lines you borrow are a metonym for the poem in which they occur, indeed for the poet you are implicitly claiming kinship with. Something not yours takes hold of you, but it also releases new potential in something you think of as yours. Thereby your work is enlarged; so thereby are you.
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An epigraph is a kind of capture that is also a kind of release. Lines from someone’s poem leave a mark on you, and you set out to respond to them. Or you discover lines that chime uncannily with something you’ve written, and juxtapose the two. Is this trespass or tribute? It may seem that two or three lines is a small and respectful borrowing. And yet implicitly you take possession through the connections you establish between another person’s words and your own. The lines you borrow are a metonym for the poem in which they occur, indeed for the poet you are implicitly claiming kinship with. Something not yours takes hold of you, but it also releases new potential in something you think of as yours. Thereby your work is enlarged; so thereby are you.
The poem that would eventually become “Paradise Lost” first appeared as a much longer and more robust poem under the title “from Lost” in a 2021 issue of Ploughshares; but even that poem was a fragment of a 124-line poem I was working on for a book-length sequence called Lost. The idea was to engage with Milton’s epic through a process of re-imagining—much like Max Richter with Vivaldi, Víkingur Ólafsson with Bach, or Miles Davis with Rodrigo—where the act of creation becomes both homage and reinvention. What remains of the original work, and what transforms through the artist's interpretation?
Even as drafts don’t show everything—and provide documentation that much can’t be documented—they do show how the process of writing itself is the transformative agent. Drafts reveal how long the metamorphosis from germinating idea to actualized poem can take; they illuminate the unpredictability of the process and the way thought and image are refined together; and they show how meaningful both incremental and large-scale changes can be. Through drafts we can see—and feel—the marvel that is a poem’s emergence.
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.
