Earth's the Right Place for Love

Revising in Public

Poems are highly polished objects, shaped and turned till they catch the light. That’s the hope anyways! But how exactly does that happen? The process is often mysterious, even to poets.

Lily Tobias put out a call for a collective poetry project. This work depended on whimsy and chance and was enough out of my control that maybe I can look at the process of revision with clearer eyes.

Lily envisioned a Poem Farm where people submitted questions and poems were grown in response. The catch was that she only gave poets a week to work on the poems! I was afraid that any answers I might have would feel too forced, too on the nose. So I decided to write answers before I saw the questions!

In the right hand corner of this draft you can see a haiku oracle—this is the way I use them in my writing practice. When I’m feeling stuck I can pull a few cards amd make a poem. That often gets things moving.

Even though I was trying to not read the questions, I happened to glance at the first one: Why is there something instead of nothing? I started out simply recording what was happening outside my window, but the draft expanded into stranger (but still true!) territory. This second list of observations became a sort of ontological argument—that something existing is better than nothing.

The finished poem is very close to this original draft.¹ You can see changes I made early on to move the poem into second person, and (mostly) past tense. I tightened up a few lines and changed the order a bit to give those strange lines more breathing room. Looking at the poem this morning, I’m rather mortified by the repetition of “out” in the third line! The compressed composition timeline contained

• a zero draft in my notebook in pink

• quick revisions in pencil

• moving onto the typed page and a simple reordering

• revision to include a few lines from the Answers to Unknown Questions draft

And all this happened in about a week! Things don’t usually move so quickly here. Currently, I am knee deep in revision of poems that I wrote last April. Those poems have sat quietly in a comp book for most of a year and have only recently been typed up. I need to print them and do a quick ordering of the drafts. There are some poems that feel close, and others that are quite rough.

I’m so grateful for the capacious creativity of Lily Tobias and her generous invitations into poetry community. She pushed me outside of my comfort zone, and that felt just right for working happening under April’s waxing Pink Moon.

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By the way the title of this post comes from one of the lines that got edited out of the poem. It’s a pretty good answer to the original question. I had to look it up to remember that it’s a line’s from “Birches” by Robert Frost.

This is the same poem I stole a line from for my poem called “In the Beginning” about Frost that’s a part of my first chapbook, Elemental. I figured if Seamus Heaney could do it, I could too!

1. In another strange layer of revision, the formatting of the poem made a few of the lines too long and they spilled onto a new line. So I had to create different line breaks. Here’s how I first envisioned the line breaks happening.