Same as last year, I'm putting up the short essay of what I came away with from this residency straight out of the residency reviews. I can hardly wait for January, to see everyone and to keep hearing from all of these amazing writers who keep changing my writing more than I ever imagined anyone could.
Without further ado, the essay: (Any grammar police, please forgive me...)
Residency Review: The Joy of Remaking
My last two semesters, I
struggled a great deal with revision. I’ve been hearing writer after writer
talking about how a poet can’t just copyedit a piece and call it good. We have
to enter into a process of re-envisioning, working the poem over and over,
expanding it more and more until it refuses to encompass any more. Then we can
condense it and condense it until we squeeze out all the extra bits in, and
only the essential pieces remain. It’s been a frustration for me, because even
though I have had a few very successful revisions, most of them consist of
moving a few lines around or taking out a word or an image to tighten a line
and letting it be. Even though I feel I know infinitely more about revision
than I ever did before I started this program, I still feel as if, when I
approach my own work, there’s nothing more for me to open up.
This residency, it seems like the
theme of revision kept coming up again and again. Claire Davis admitted her
frustrations, and her dedication, by telling us she revised three hundred plus
pages at least three times. And then she showed us where she finds small spaces
to open up—spaces of abstraction which may or may not be good enough or right
for the piece can be cracked open and spill over into pages and pages of new
opportunity. Or, a character may become narrow and need to be squeezed out.
Charles Johnson admitted to throwing out thousands of pages and trying on
persona after persona until, finally, the voice and motivation came out right.
Then Aimee Nezukumatathil came
out and dropped the haibun form right in front of me. That little prose poem,
which usually makes me so nervous, with its accompanying haiku seemed, suddenly,
to be the answer to a poem I’ve been struggling with for a year and a half.
Ellen Bass warned us to watch out for moments in a poem when emotion is too
easy, and to re-orient the speaker’s vision toward the things that triggered
the speaker’s emotion, instead of writing down the feelings themselves. Joe
Millar, with Dorianne and Ellen’s help, gave me new perspective on line breaks—showing
me how to rethink and re-shape a poem with a simple syllabic exercise. Peter
Sears, with the help of Richard Hugo, showed me that I can use perfect meter in
a piece without it becoming obvious or monotonous by working it into the
sentence structure instead of into the line.
Armed with these and other tools,
such as Mary Helen Stefaniak’s declaration that eavesdropping is a perfectly
acceptable form of research (which I’ve always employed, but will do so now
without guilt) and Mike Myer’s admonition to always start in place in order to
get the reader’s feet on the ground, I feel like I’m a little better prepared
to re-envision my pieces. To give them a little more life, and, when they’re
bursting with it, start to whittle them back down. Do I believe I’ve solved all
my revision problems? Does a writer ever? But I do feel as if this residency
and these writers have given me more confidence, a better understanding of the
problems that will come up in my writing, and a few more things to toss into my
toolbox to help along the way.
Thanks to all who follow these posts. I hope they're interesting for you.
~Hannah Mae
