What Sparks Poetry

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.

Carol Moldaw on “Go Figure”

Drafts can be fascinating but there are a lot of questions about the development of a poem that they can’t answer. When I look at the rudimentary beginnings of “Go Figure,” I can see that the poem started with the fixation I had when young with Modigliani’s paintings, my self-identification torn between the women he painted and the figure of the artist behind the paintings. The drafts, though, don’t show why I put aside the idea of self-bifurcation and instead sought to trace the evolution of my sense of self through a progression of paintings. I remembered, and wrote about, how once, ravaged by anger, I had seen myself in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” but I couldn’t think of any paintings of women my age or even twenty years younger that I identified with.

Feeling stymied, I shifted gears and went back to notes I’d taken four years before, when I’d seen the dakini figures and erotica carved into the temple façades at Khajuraho, in India. A few lines I’d written under the heading “Human Sexual Coil” were meant to be the beginning of an erotic daisy chain of a poem, one sexual act and actor sexually linked to the next in a circle—a poetic orgiastic ouroboros that, unsurprisingly, I hadn’t been able to develop. But something clicked—the drafts can’t tell you how or why, only when—and I put the Modigliani nudes and the dakinis together, as expressions of hidden, inner, sensual selves. That was in 2012. The drafts didn’t get very far before I put them away, not taking them up again for five years.

I can’t say why, but in mid-January 2018 I went back to the images from Khajuraho, concentrating on the sculpture of a woman twisting to look at the sole of her foot:

“. . . There I was,
twisting my back to look at an invisible speck
on the heel I held up with one hand,
keeping balance, unfazed by the stares . .”

In many ways, this draft marks the end of my blind groping and the beginning of the poem proper. Nothing I’d written up to that point had caught my poetic interest linguistically; my thoughts, preoccupations, and perceptions had been floating around without substance or anchor. In this draft though, images began to coalesce, and the lines develop a distinctive voice—the poem’s voice. How does the scorpion tattoo that appears here later become a tattoo of a fishnet stocking?

That happened in a later draft, when I began to think about etchings’ crosshatches. Words and phrases that now seem key to me first showed up in this draft, though like the tattoo they would undergo changes: “unfazed by stares”; “countless self-absorbed iterations”; “brush and palette in hand.” It gave me a kind of joy to recognize that “brush and palette” applied both to painting and makeup. I wanted a reader to experience that same recognition for themselves, without the poem making a point of it, but I also wanted that dual reference to seem integral. I could feel the poem gaining heft. Modigliani’s nudes never reappeared but were replaced by Degas and Lautrec bathers. After languishing for six years under the working title “The Mirror of Art,” “Khajuraho” turned into “Go Figure” over the next six months.

By May 2018, I thought of “Go Figure” as essentially complete: it had its stanzaic shape; the flow from image to image had settled; the ending, which had surprised me, held. I began to see preoccupations developed in “Go Figure” showing up in other poems that were in various stages at the same time. Those poems weren’t so much offshoots–it was more that they all began in the same petri dish and split into separate selves. But because of the centrality of its concerns, “Go Figure” became the book’s title poem.

As happens with many poems though, I continued to make little tweaks and adjustments. Some of these involved questions of sound and rhythm; some, the refinement of image. For instance, I vacillated for many months between “unfazed/ by the gaze of mason . . .” and unfazed by gaze/of mason . . .” and eventually simplified “a notched crosshatch illusion of a fishnet/stocking on the sag” to “a notched/crosshatch illusion of fishnets.”

Then, right at the last minute, before turning in the final manuscript, reading each poem with heightened alertness, I noticed something I had missed, the use of the impersonal pronoun “one” to begin the first stanza:

Later, it’s the painter’s gaze, for the one
stepping out of her bath, also slightly coiled,
stepping over the tub’s rim, sideways into
the easel like a towel. We call her by
the painter’s name: a Lautrec. A Degas.

Throughout the first two stanzas I had toggled between using “her” and “I.” Why, I wondered, had I resorted here to using “one”, which created emotional distance? How had it never caught my attention? Now I couldn’t un-notice it.

Trying to fix this was more complicated than I’d expected; with the one pulled thread, the stanza started to unravel. I saw that “later, it’s the painter’s gaze,” which began the sentence and the stanza, had almost grammatically predicated the use of “one”; I saw also that the five lines contained two almost identical phrases, “stepping out of her bath” and “stepping over the tub’s rim.” Changing any one thing changed the lineation and the emphasis; the order of the clauses began to seem wrong. I felt like I was working on a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get the pieces to fit. After some trial and error, I took out what seemed most unnecessary, the redundant phrases and “the painter’s gaze,” which had linked the stanza to the ending of the one before it. Instead, I linked the stanza back to the poem’s beginning, to my gaze, and took it further, so that I saw not her stepping out of her bath, but me. At the stanza’s end, when it is “me” not “she” that “you” (not “we”) call by the painter’s name, the merger of “her” and “me” is complete:

And in her, also slightly coiled, rising
out of the bath under a painter’s gaze, I saw
myself, stepping over the tub’s rim, sideways
into the easel like a towel. You call me
by the painter’s name: a Lautrec. A Degas.

This slight change felt momentous and caused me to go over all the pronouns in the poem, looking for places where “I” and “my” could replace “she” and “her.” “Her neck,” “her back,” “her toes” became “my neck,” “my back,” “my toes.” From it being “she” who was “unfazed/by gaze of mason, acolyte, or tourist,” it became “I’m unfazed/ . . .” These changes were in keeping with the second half of the poem where “she” had already disappeared and “I” and “me” taken over. Finally, the poem’s grammatical point of view embodied what the poem wanted to express.

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.

Writing Prompt

All art seeks to share a point of view about being in the world. In Carol Moldaw’s essay, she explores the evolution of her poem, “Go Figure,” and how, ultimately, shifting the pronouns between third and first person both strengthened and added complexity to the poem’s perspective.

Find a draft that is important to you and that you’re struggling with, a draft whose subject you may not even be able to fully articulate yet. Play with the poem’s perspectives, changing up its pronouns, seeing where it goes if the first, second, and third person are interchanged. Try a plural or impersonal point of view. As you experiment, notice how these shifts affect the poem’s vision and its tone, how they create or close the distance between subject and speaker, reader and text. How do these shifts require other changes of the poem and push it forward in new ways? Does one perspective click and help the poem find itself?

—Poetry Daily

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Headshot of Carol Moldaw
Photo:
Don Usner

Carol Moldaw

Carol Moldaw is the author of seven books of poetry and a novella, most recently Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024). Other books include Beauty Refracted (2018), So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (2010) and The Widening (2008). Recent poems and essays have appeared in APR, Lana Turner, The New York Review of Book, Poetry, Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words,” and Subtropics. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish; a volume of her selected poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming from Guangxi University Press (Beijing) in 2025. She lives in Santa Fe, NM, and teaches privately.