Wow. I must be doing something wrong, then, or I must not be writing poetry. I think the most number of drafts I've ever done is four. If the poem doesn't come out right by then, I abandon it and try again from scratch. Sixty drafts? The mind completely boggles.
While I understand that some writers think and work that way, I don't. I've more than once been criticized by A Poet for not doing that much work on my poems—and yet they couldn't say the poems weren't bad.
It's a completely alien way of working, for me. I literally cannot imagine doing sixty drafts of a poem without that process literally killing every thing in the poem that originally caused me to want to write it.
I have to agree with you, Art. It is phrases I linger over, not whole poems. You ought to know when you've lost the thread ... and then you should give up. Sixty drafts? That's not poetry. That's verse composition. Not the same thing at all.
This one of mine may have taken 60 revisions: Photo Seven of Seven. (The photo series link there is dead. Here it is: Tyler Hick's "Taliban Execution". It inspired the poem.) The poem changed form more than once, and would not move in. Then, after it found its form, which was fairly similar to the original, with a a syllable less per line, it had to be smoothed out until it was almost conversational even though it is trapped in a short line odd syllabic/elegy.
I'll often revise and revise. In fact, I am due now to go through all the poems I have written, throw out the trash, keep the ones that still look good or will not move in yet as they are, and revise what needs revising. Some take longer than others, and more revisions than others. Sixty is a bit much. Although, often when I trash a poem, it comes back at me in a new form, which I do not recognize until the poem is drafted and somewhat moved in. Then I'll recognize that there was gold there after all.
Rus, sorting through and throwing out the trash is not "revision," it's the sort of editing one does when gathering together a collection, be it book length or chapbook length, or whatever.
I'll grant that long series-poem might total a high number of drafts, but that's cumulative throughout the series, wherein each poem within the series might have a few drafts. But I doubt each individual poem within the series has sixty drafts. That's ridiculous.
I agree with Frank, that's verse composition at that point, not poetry at all.
Although I have to say, Mr. Barker merely reiterates the problem when he makes comments such as:
"I always revise obsessively. . . ."
"I don’t really believe that any poem manifests purely from inspiration."
"I probably don’t let poems sit as long as they should."
This is all very revealing about the psychology of the poet, and yet it doesn't really tell us much about each poem's quality. if the end result is a good poem, that's great—nonetheless I find it hard to give obsession an easy pass, when it comes to poetic quality. In my experience, obsessiveness usually harms rather than helps any creative process.
I am composing a rebuttal essay on my own blog right now, which points out some real problems with this attitude—in my opinion. Here it is:
"Wow. I must be doing something wrong, then, or I must not be writing poetry."
Or maybe Karr just writes differently than you.
It may very well be "completely alien to you", but that doesn't mean other poets are doing something wrong because they spend more time on a poem than you. Does it?
Whether one feels poetry must be a free flowing and spontaneous revelation, or a careful and laborious search, I don't see where preferring one method over another opens oneself to criticism.
Surely it is the poem, rather than the process, we should be examining.
As you know, I don't only do formal poems, but when I do, there is reason to them. Once the form is selected, the work begins of keeping to this necessary dimension. Once the work begins, it may take dozens of drafts, with nothing obsessive about it, just simply taking the time it takes to craft what needs to be crafted. I've got a brother-in-law who has a train set that he keeps crafting. It's never quite done. I wouldn't call him obsessed. That's just one of his hobbies and interests.
Multiple drafts can be needed for the prose style poems as well as the more verse style poems. I usually don't trash a poem until I see that it was all river mud anyway, with no gold. Often when a poem comes back as another poem, it's a case of the new form being the right one, which means the full inspiration in perspective and dimensions fit as well, as the needed language or rhythms newly revealed, brings the musing to light.
Jonathon and Rus, I addressed those points in my own blog post.
I'm all for mutual tolerance between differing styles and methods of creative process. But you have to admit, Mary Karr spoke quite categorically, and to students. So I reserve the right to disagree, and let her and the world know so.
I'm all for mutual tolerance between differing creative processes—and I am not for someone dictating their process to me or anyone else. My strongest objection is to statements of method like Ms. Karr's that seem to me to be quite intolerant. Having the read the rest of her interview and opinions, I stand by my first impression. Again, I addressed this on my own blog post, so I'm not going to repeat my whole argument here.
Whether one feels poetry must be a free flowing and spontaneous revelation, or a careful and laborious search, I don't see where preferring one method over another opens oneself to criticism.
Jonathon, I agree with you on almost every point. However, I have been more than once on the receiving end of exactly the sort of criticism you're talking about here, and from poets who you might think would know better—and I've written about it before, on my own blog—so while I agree with you, I also have little use for the attitude Ms. Karr's comments exemplify. She's just wrong—because she can't speak for all poets, as she sure seems to want to be doing.
I read your essay before I posted my response to it. For this response, I am addressing this section here:
Third, the only kind of poet who might do sixty drafts is a formalist poet who is trying to shoehorn words into a form. I agree with Frank Wilson, who says that's verse composition, which is not the same thing at all as poetry. There is something that smacks of obsessive-compulsive disorder in much formalist (including neo-formalist) poetry: an emphasis on the precision of form, which again may conceal a lack of having anything to say. As if the manner of construction itself was of intrinsic merit: the means justifying the ends.
I define two sins popular in much of today's poetry--particularly the neo-formalist stuff--which signify decoration and can starve a poem of value:
1. Absence of emotion. What should I as a reader feel? This grows from but is not equivalent to what the speaker/author feels. Questioning a poem's central emotion steers me beyond the poem's ostensible subject and surface loveliness to its ultimate effect. Purely decorative poetry leaves me cold.
2. Lack of clarity. The forms of obscurity in decorative poetry are many and insidious: references that serve no clear purpose, for instance, or ornate diction that seeks to elevate a mundane experience rather than clarify a remarkable one. Lack of clarity actually alienates a reader and prevents any emotional engagement with the poem.
It is difficult for me to accept Karr as the one you can prop up for such an attack as you have. Her revisions would be to achieve both emotion and clarity--that the poem under revision would have something to say. She also attacks formalists for having their form be mere decoration, something that would "conceal a lack of having anything to say"--as you say.
Rus, I appreciate the link to Karr's essay, and the quote from it. I just read through that essay with some relish. I will find that an interesting and useful re-read, no doubt.
However, there is no contradiction. I see nothing in the segment of her essay you quoted that directly refutes anything I've said. My comments were based on her attitude in the interview, which often came over, to my ears, as somewhat rigid and dictatorial; perhaps that was the venue of publication that colored that; nonetheless, she said what she said there.
In the part of her essay that you've quoted, Rus, she and I agree about decorativeness, about filling out the form at the expense of improvisatory flow and enotion.
I just read through "Against Decoration," and I will probably quote from it the next time I discuss the issue of Language Poetry, neo-formalism (those two are alike in their exaltation of surface over depth) and related topics.
But nowhere in that essay do I see any point where she addresses the issue of the endless rewrite. Using that essay in the context of this discussion of rewrites is apples and oranges. In that essay, Ms. Karr does not make any direct comment that I could find about the number of drafts involved. So if there is a contradiction here it is not mine, but between what she writes in her essay and what she said in the interview.
(continued due to Blogger's comment length constraints)
Rus write:
It is difficult for me to accept Karr as the one you can prop up for such an attack as you have. Her revisions would be to achieve both emotion and clarity--that the poem under revision would have something to say.
Just how exactly does that work? Revising to achieve both emotion and clarity seems a bit contradictory, since emotion and clarity are often themselves in conflict or at least in opposition. Emotional mire and intellectual clarity; the muddle and muck of feeling, or the crystallized instant of the constellation of complex emotions (this latter is what haiku often tries to do), does not always come into balance with clarity. It's more likely to come into balance with mystery. That's one of the whole points of poetry: the examination of the depths where intellect cannot always go, no matter how measured the voice of the poem is. (An exemplary contrast to make here would be between Rainer Maria Rilke and Alexander Pope.)
I think it's a tangled bit of justification to say that sixty drafts will bring the emotion back into a poem. From the comments I'm getting from other writers at this point, it seems that many find the exact opposite to be true. The emotion might never have been there in the original piece, in its original flow; in which case how does one bring it in?
Is applying emotion with a trowel in rewrite not a form of manipulative dramatizing, for example? I've seen a lot of bad poetry that shows its scaffolding, wherein such manipulation is obvious, and has the contrary effect to its intention. What tool does one use to reweave the "red thread" back into the poem?
I don't think that one can treat emotion in a poem as another intellectual (craft) element to be added in or subtracted out, as subject to the words. Emotion in a poem is not just another verbal/intellectual tool or aspect of poetry, to be plugged back in like a power socket. What's often unsaid but strongly felt is where the emotional resonance lies—look at Dickinson, look at Rilke—unless of course the poet regards intellect as the supreme tool over all others; a viewpoint I disagree with, and have rebutted more than once.
In which I quote Adrienne Rich at some length to support my point. We can consider that a position paper, and agree to disagree.
I'm okay with leaving this as a clash of irreconcilable worldviews, as I've written in my blog post; again, though, I don't see anything in Ms. Karr's essay, which I largely agree with in terms of primary topic, that refutes, or for that matter supports, her position on sixty drafts. Apples and oranges.
Yes, of course, I thought you would agree with her. That's what I noticed. It was why I bothered to find the quote and post it up. That you agreed with Karr means that you propped her up as a straw man to knock her down with your argument. I believe your essay needs revision. You shot from the hip.
On emotion. Emotion in a poem is what the poem brings to the reader outside the intellect, the moving visions, whether they make us sad, or laugh, or witness god or sense something like deja vu. In visual terms, it is the image that will do this. In audio terms, it is the music that will. In tactile terms, it is how the poem moves through the body.
In terms of craft, according with Karr's train of throught, you will need clarity to strike such emotive chords. Karr notes how this would work in her landmark essay. If the poet's writing isn't clear, it will not get to the reader the way the poet would want: no vision, no chord, nothing moving. Craft makes it vivid. She does both clarity and emotion in her poetry, so this is not something she teaches but does not practice. She subtracts the decoration, and I suggest she would advise you, me or anyone else to do the same if we were to take one of her workshops.
By the way, I am not professing my ideas, but scratching my head as to the tangents you took and the assumptions you made once you took flight with her 60 revisions remark.
That's me, Rus Bowden, signed in under the IBPC gmail account that David Ayers setup. I didn't realize that the Lowelldude@aol.com account had been signed out when I checked IBPC e-mail.
There's no straw man involved, since the essay, as I said, is apples and oranges to the comments made in the interview. So what if I agree with one thing she says, and disagree with another? I was responding to her comment to students about how many drafts she uses to write a poem. Nowhere in the essay does she discuss that. There's no connection. How many times must I say that?
I didn't realize that an honest and gut-level response to a statement by a poet required such justification or rationalization. I must say, I find the demand for such justification to be interesting in and of itself—I didn't realize that there was now in place a litmus test for stating one's opinions in public. I certainly see no reason to be defensive about it. Essays are essays. Refute me in another essay, I have no problem with that. It's probably all just opinion and friendly disagreement anyway. Although I certainly don't see the logic in it.
As for the number of drafts used, did I ever say anything about who was a better writer? In fact, in my essay, I went out of my way to affirm that there is no one true way to get to the finish line.
I'm genuinely baffled. Feel free to agree to disagree.
I don't need to refute you in an essay, I already did that in this conversation thread.
You put Mary up to mean something she did not. She does not have the intentions you made up for her. I am sure she does not teach poetry the way you have made her up to teach it. She is a straw person for your essay.
She has now reiterated that she does 60 revisions. There you go, a very successful writer, and a good one too, I might add, who does not write the way you profess. Isn't that great that she revises so much?
Maybe you can sign on, but only look at that thread. I don't know of any other way to read from someone's wall otherwise. I keep my wall open to anyone who clicks in, not just my Facebook friends.
"Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it."
ReplyDeleteWow. I must be doing something wrong, then, or I must not be writing poetry. I think the most number of drafts I've ever done is four. If the poem doesn't come out right by then, I abandon it and try again from scratch. Sixty drafts? The mind completely boggles.
While I understand that some writers think and work that way, I don't. I've more than once been criticized by A Poet for not doing that much work on my poems—and yet they couldn't say the poems weren't bad.
It's a completely alien way of working, for me. I literally cannot imagine doing sixty drafts of a poem without that process literally killing every thing in the poem that originally caused me to want to write it.
I have to agree with you, Art. It is phrases I linger over, not whole poems. You ought to know when you've lost the thread ... and then you should give up. Sixty drafts? That's not poetry. That's verse composition. Not the same thing at all.
ReplyDeleteThis one of mine may have taken 60 revisions: Photo Seven of Seven. (The photo series link there is dead. Here it is: Tyler Hick's "Taliban Execution". It inspired the poem.) The poem changed form more than once, and would not move in. Then, after it found its form, which was fairly similar to the original, with a a syllable less per line, it had to be smoothed out until it was almost conversational even though it is trapped in a short line odd syllabic/elegy.
ReplyDeleteI'll often revise and revise. In fact, I am due now to go through all the poems I have written, throw out the trash, keep the ones that still look good or will not move in yet as they are, and revise what needs revising. Some take longer than others, and more revisions than others. Sixty is a bit much. Although, often when I trash a poem, it comes back at me in a new form, which I do not recognize until the poem is drafted and somewhat moved in. Then I'll recognize that there was gold there after all.
Rus, sorting through and throwing out the trash is not "revision," it's the sort of editing one does when gathering together a collection, be it book length or chapbook length, or whatever.
ReplyDeleteI'll grant that long series-poem might total a high number of drafts, but that's cumulative throughout the series, wherein each poem within the series might have a few drafts. But I doubt each individual poem within the series has sixty drafts. That's ridiculous.
I agree with Frank, that's verse composition at that point, not poetry at all.
At Brian Brodeur's blog, poets respond to his questions about drafts and revision and about other things connected with "How a Poem Happens":
ReplyDeletehttp://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/
Thanks, Dave.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have to say, Mr. Barker merely reiterates the problem when he makes comments such as:
"I always revise obsessively. . . ."
"I don’t really believe that any poem manifests purely from inspiration."
"I probably don’t let poems sit as long as they should."
This is all very revealing about the psychology of the poet, and yet it doesn't really tell us much about each poem's quality. if the end result is a good poem, that's great—nonetheless I find it hard to give obsession an easy pass, when it comes to poetic quality. In my experience, obsessiveness usually harms rather than helps any creative process.
I am composing a rebuttal essay on my own blog right now, which points out some real problems with this attitude—in my opinion. Here it is:
Sixty Drafts? No Way!
"Wow. I must be doing something wrong, then, or I must not be writing poetry."
ReplyDeleteOr maybe Karr just writes differently than you.
It may very well be "completely alien to you", but that doesn't mean other poets are doing something wrong because they spend more time on a poem than you. Does it?
Whether one feels poetry must be a free flowing and spontaneous revelation, or a careful and laborious search, I don't see where preferring one method over another opens oneself to criticism.
Surely it is the poem, rather than the process, we should be examining.
Hi Art,
ReplyDeleteAs you know, I don't only do formal poems, but when I do, there is reason to them. Once the form is selected, the work begins of keeping to this necessary dimension. Once the work begins, it may take dozens of drafts, with nothing obsessive about it, just simply taking the time it takes to craft what needs to be crafted. I've got a brother-in-law who has a train set that he keeps crafting. It's never quite done. I wouldn't call him obsessed. That's just one of his hobbies and interests.
Multiple drafts can be needed for the prose style poems as well as the more verse style poems. I usually don't trash a poem until I see that it was all river mud anyway, with no gold. Often when a poem comes back as another poem, it's a case of the new form being the right one, which means the full inspiration in perspective and dimensions fit as well, as the needed language or rhythms newly revealed, brings the musing to light.
Jonathon and Rus, I addressed those points in my own blog post.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for mutual tolerance between differing styles and methods of creative process. But you have to admit, Mary Karr spoke quite categorically, and to students. So I reserve the right to disagree, and let her and the world know so.
I'm all for mutual tolerance between differing creative processes—and I am not for someone dictating their process to me or anyone else. My strongest objection is to statements of method like Ms. Karr's that seem to me to be quite intolerant. Having the read the rest of her interview and opinions, I stand by my first impression. Again, I addressed this on my own blog post, so I'm not going to repeat my whole argument here.
Whether one feels poetry must be a free flowing and spontaneous revelation, or a careful and laborious search, I don't see where preferring one method over another opens oneself to criticism.
ReplyDeleteJonathon, I agree with you on almost every point. However, I have been more than once on the receiving end of exactly the sort of criticism you're talking about here, and from poets who you might think would know better—and I've written about it before, on my own blog—so while I agree with you, I also have little use for the attitude Ms. Karr's comments exemplify. She's just wrong—because she can't speak for all poets, as she sure seems to want to be doing.
Hi Art,
ReplyDeleteI read your essay before I posted my response to it. For this response, I am addressing this section here:
Third, the only kind of poet who might do sixty drafts is a formalist poet who is trying to shoehorn words into a form. I agree with Frank Wilson, who says that's verse composition, which is not the same thing at all as poetry. There is something that smacks of obsessive-compulsive disorder in much formalist (including neo-formalist) poetry: an emphasis on the precision of form, which again may conceal a lack of having anything to say. As if the manner of construction itself was of intrinsic merit: the means justifying the ends.
Mary Karr digs into neo-formalism in her essay Against Decoration:
I define two sins popular in much of today's poetry--particularly the neo-formalist stuff--which signify decoration and can starve a poem of value:
1. Absence of emotion. What should I as a reader feel? This grows from but is not equivalent to what the speaker/author feels. Questioning a poem's central emotion steers me beyond the poem's ostensible subject and surface loveliness to its ultimate effect. Purely decorative poetry leaves me cold.
2. Lack of clarity. The forms of obscurity in decorative poetry are many and insidious: references that serve no clear purpose, for instance, or ornate diction that seeks to elevate a mundane experience rather than clarify a remarkable one. Lack of clarity actually alienates a reader and prevents any emotional engagement with the poem.
It is difficult for me to accept Karr as the one you can prop up for such an attack as you have. Her revisions would be to achieve both emotion and clarity--that the poem under revision would have something to say. She also attacks formalists for having their form be mere decoration, something that would "conceal a lack of having anything to say"--as you say.
Rus, I appreciate the link to Karr's essay, and the quote from it. I just read through that essay with some relish. I will find that an interesting and useful re-read, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is no contradiction. I see nothing in the segment of her essay you quoted that directly refutes anything I've said. My comments were based on her attitude in the interview, which often came over, to my ears, as somewhat rigid and dictatorial; perhaps that was the venue of publication that colored that; nonetheless, she said what she said there.
In the part of her essay that you've quoted, Rus, she and I agree about decorativeness, about filling out the form at the expense of improvisatory flow and enotion.
I just read through "Against Decoration," and I will probably quote from it the next time I discuss the issue of Language Poetry, neo-formalism (those two are alike in their exaltation of surface over depth) and related topics.
But nowhere in that essay do I see any point where she addresses the issue of the endless rewrite. Using that essay in the context of this discussion of rewrites is apples and oranges. In that essay, Ms. Karr does not make any direct comment that I could find about the number of drafts involved. So if there is a contradiction here it is not mine, but between what she writes in her essay and what she said in the interview.
(continued)
(continued due to Blogger's comment length constraints)
ReplyDeleteRus write:
It is difficult for me to accept Karr as the one you can prop up for such an attack as you have. Her revisions would be to achieve both emotion and clarity--that the poem under revision would have something to say.
Just how exactly does that work? Revising to achieve both emotion and clarity seems a bit contradictory, since emotion and clarity are often themselves in conflict or at least in opposition. Emotional mire and intellectual clarity; the muddle and muck of feeling, or the crystallized instant of the constellation of complex emotions (this latter is what haiku often tries to do), does not always come into balance with clarity. It's more likely to come into balance with mystery. That's one of the whole points of poetry: the examination of the depths where intellect cannot always go, no matter how measured the voice of the poem is. (An exemplary contrast to make here would be between Rainer Maria Rilke and Alexander Pope.)
I think it's a tangled bit of justification to say that sixty drafts will bring the emotion back into a poem. From the comments I'm getting from other writers at this point, it seems that many find the exact opposite to be true. The emotion might never have been there in the original piece, in its original flow; in which case how does one bring it in?
Is applying emotion with a trowel in rewrite not a form of manipulative dramatizing, for example? I've seen a lot of bad poetry that shows its scaffolding, wherein such manipulation is obvious, and has the contrary effect to its intention. What tool does one use to reweave the "red thread" back into the poem?
I don't think that one can treat emotion in a poem as another intellectual (craft) element to be added in or subtracted out, as subject to the words. Emotion in a poem is not just another verbal/intellectual tool or aspect of poetry, to be plugged back in like a power socket. What's often unsaid but strongly felt is where the emotional resonance lies—look at Dickinson, look at Rilke—unless of course the poet regards intellect as the supreme tool over all others; a viewpoint I disagree with, and have rebutted more than once.
Why Poems Written from the HEad Ultimately Fail
In which I quote Adrienne Rich at some length to support my point. We can consider that a position paper, and agree to disagree.
I'm okay with leaving this as a clash of irreconcilable worldviews, as I've written in my blog post; again, though, I don't see anything in Ms. Karr's essay, which I largely agree with in terms of primary topic, that refutes, or for that matter supports, her position on sixty drafts. Apples and oranges.
Hi Art,
ReplyDeleteYes, of course, I thought you would agree with her. That's what I noticed. It was why I bothered to find the quote and post it up. That you agreed with Karr means that you propped her up as a straw man to knock her down with your argument. I believe your essay needs revision. You shot from the hip.
On emotion. Emotion in a poem is what the poem brings to the reader outside the intellect, the moving visions, whether they make us sad, or laugh, or witness god or sense something like deja vu. In visual terms, it is the image that will do this. In audio terms, it is the music that will. In tactile terms, it is how the poem moves through the body.
In terms of craft, according with Karr's train of throught, you will need clarity to strike such emotive chords. Karr notes how this would work in her landmark essay. If the poet's writing isn't clear, it will not get to the reader the way the poet would want: no vision, no chord, nothing moving. Craft makes it vivid. She does both clarity and emotion in her poetry, so this is not something she teaches but does not practice. She subtracts the decoration, and I suggest she would advise you, me or anyone else to do the same if we were to take one of her workshops.
By the way, I am not professing my ideas, but scratching my head as to the tangents you took and the assumptions you made once you took flight with her 60 revisions remark.
But we're all still friends, right?
ReplyDeleteHi Frank,
ReplyDeleteYes. Here is my wall post about these threads at Facebook: "Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it." --Mary Karr
The latest comment is Mary Karr's. She says, "60 drafts. way. Wish I were a better writer, and I could do it faster. But I labor the thang."
So Mary's staying friends too.
That's me, Rus Bowden, signed in under the IBPC gmail account that David Ayers setup. I didn't realize that the Lowelldude@aol.com account had been signed out when I checked IBPC e-mail.
ReplyDeleteThere's no straw man involved, since the essay, as I said, is apples and oranges to the comments made in the interview. So what if I agree with one thing she says, and disagree with another? I was responding to her comment to students about how many drafts she uses to write a poem. Nowhere in the essay does she discuss that. There's no connection. How many times must I say that?
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that an honest and gut-level response to a statement by a poet required such justification or rationalization. I must say, I find the demand for such justification to be interesting in and of itself—I didn't realize that there was now in place a litmus test for stating one's opinions in public. I certainly see no reason to be defensive about it. Essays are essays. Refute me in another essay, I have no problem with that. It's probably all just opinion and friendly disagreement anyway. Although I certainly don't see the logic in it.
As for the number of drafts used, did I ever say anything about who was a better writer? In fact, in my essay, I went out of my way to affirm that there is no one true way to get to the finish line.
I'm genuinely baffled. Feel free to agree to disagree.
Counting Drafts
ReplyDeleteI'm not on Facebook, BTW, and never will be. Is there another way to read those possibly very interesting comments? Thanks.
Hi Art,
ReplyDeleteI don't need to refute you in an essay, I already did that in this conversation thread.
You put Mary up to mean something she did not. She does not have the intentions you made up for her. I am sure she does not teach poetry the way you have made her up to teach it. She is a straw person for your essay.
She has now reiterated that she does 60 revisions. There you go, a very successful writer, and a good one too, I might add, who does not write the way you profess. Isn't that great that she revises so much?
Hi Art,
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can sign on, but only look at that thread. I don't know of any other way to read from someone's wall otherwise. I keep my wall open to anyone who clicks in, not just my Facebook friends.