This past week I wrote a poem that I really liked. I sent it
to my trusted reader (Jeff). Other than a couple punctuation/line break things,
I got the thumbs up. Thank goodness I didn’t start submitting it right away as
I sometimes do.
The first stanza of the poem was:
“A passenger arrives one Saturday
from a dirty, broken town.
Her head leans against the window
of the finally stopped
train; she opens her eyes to
brilliant sun,
prepares to disembark.”
I went to sleep. I’m lucky because I can obsess about my
writing twice a day —during my afternoon naps, and during my
middle-of-the-night insomnia. Yes, I’m so lucky.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the poem. I’m all for
negative capability—inviting the reader into a poem to draw their own
conclusions—but in the first line? That’s not fair to the poem, and it’s not
fair to the reader. So I began to obsess: Why was the town she left broken and
dirty, what made the new town any better, and how could I re-write the poem to
explain more without telling everything?
I got ridiculously creative. One of the good things about
obsessing when you’re not near your computer, is you can go from one extreme to
the other, before settling on a place that works in the middle. I ended up
with:
A passenger arrives one Saturday
from a broken town
with no chances. Her head leans
against the window
of the finally stopped train; she
opens her eyes
to brilliant sun, prepares to
disembark.
“a broken town with no chances”. That still has enough
breathing room for the reader to think about what those chances are. I took out
“dirty” so the line length would be better. It wasn’t important to the poem
anyway (we’ll discuss concision at a later date).
God willing, at some point this poem will be accepted, and
once it’s published I will post the whole thing here. I don’t mind if you cross
your fingers for me.
Down the Rabbit Hole,
aka the Tipping Point
Years ago I learned about this in a workshop with Nick Flynn
and it’s amazingly true. All poems have places in them that are like forks in
the road. You choose one direction and write your poem. If you had chosen another
direction, the poem would have been completely different. This is true whether
you pretend to be looking left or right, or at a whole traffic circle of
directions!
Take the stanza of the poem above. Instead of saying “with
no chances”, what if I had said “with no farmers”? The poem could have been a
nostalgic piece about family. About getting up before dawn to light the stove
and fill a thermos of coffee for the dad, who was about to spend a back-breaking
day out in the fields. Maybe not the dad. Maybe the brother, who had to forfeit
a sports scholarship to work the farm when the dad came back from a war too
broken to climb onto the tractor.
What if I had said “with no music”? Barring a reprise of
“Footloose”, why on earth would a town have no music, and why would that be
important to the character?
Tipping Point does
not mean Tip-Toe:
click for more info |
There are lots of poems and lots of books about pain, about
recoveries, about sexuality and other personal and sometimes difficult issues.
I’m not suggesting you tip-toe around those subjects; some of the writing is
exquisite and necessary. I’m suggesting that when writing these sometimes
difficult pieces, you take the time to find a tipping point, and determine if going
in a different direction will say what you want to say in a better way for you,
for the work, for the reader. There are tipping points in all writing; they may
be easier to see in the “tough” work.
Jeff is currently reading “Sacrament of Bodies” by Nigerian
poet Romeo Oriogun, published by University of Nebraska Press. He sent me some
of the writing from it Friday. To quote Jeff it is “A powerful and emotionally
deep witness to the salience of the body and its desires as it overcomes the
strictures of cultural custom and religion.” I’m not as articulate as Jeff, but
I agree.
Two excerpts Jeff sent me were:
“Say cities where the only freedom
for a man who loves another man is
to leave.
I tell you this so you understand
my silence,
understand why I crawled into my
voice.”
And
“I only have the lullaby to remind
me that my father once held my hand and called me beautiful.”
I don’t know this poet. I don’t know if he made an initial
choice to write his poems as is, or if he came to a crossroads, and made a
choice. These are examples of using exquisite language to convey something that
could have been more graphic if he’d wanted, but in my opinion, they would have
been less poetic and probably not as powerful. For me as the reader, my heart
is stunned for him, and what his life
must’ve been like. This is negative capability—I was invited in, and I drew my
own conclusions about his upbringing. I think that is our job as writers, to
invite our readers in.
Taking a turn-off at the Tipping Point allows you, and the
reader, to use their imagination. Think about the possibilities your writing
can have—and no matter what anyone else thinks, what you finally decide to
write will be the best thing that you want to write. This is NOT the
same as a journal editor giving you suggestions, Rich gives me suggestions all
the time. Jeff, who is my trusted reader, gives me suggestions all the time. This
is about what you present being the absolute right direction for you and your
writing.
God bless. Feel good.
Write well xo
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Tobi Alfier's most recent collection of poetry is Slices Of Alice. She is also co-editor with Jeff Alfier of the San Pedro River Review. Don't miss Tobi's columns on the craft of poetry: insert your email address in the "Follow By Email" box to the right of this article and you'll be notified every time a new article appears.
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