Craft Thoughts: Honoring the Poem’s First Draft
By Joanne Durham, written April 2022
I enjoy participating in groups with other women who come together to write and then share our first drafts. But too often we expect those drafts, from 30 or 40 minutes of writing (sometimes even less), to sound like finished poems. If not, we feel like we’ve failed and aren’t good writers. We can spend more time apologizing for what we’ve drafted than noticing what is working!
When I first started writing poetry, I thought that the first draft was supposed to be the final. I thought because I wrote poetry to get emotional truth on paper, I would spoil it if I revised it. I might fix grammar or a word here or there, but if the poem didn’t resonate, I just put it aside and forgot about it.
All that changed when I taught children in a writing workshop. I learned that by conferring with them about their intentions and teaching them some simple elements of craft, they could transform their first drafts into rich and meaningful poems for themselves and other readers.
In a marvelous section of her Living Room Craft Series on Revision, Ellen Bass shared the first draft of James Wright’s poem, “Hook,” from an interview released by his wife. I had loved this poem for a long time. I was so amazed that almost the entire final poem didn’t show up until the sixth verse in his first draft! It was by stripping away everything from the original that didn’t support the dramatic center of the poem that he gave the poem its intense substance and power.
So, I’ve come to think of my first draft as just scattering seeds. It’s the nurturing I give my poems over time that shapes them into something that might blossom. The crocuses in my yard will lift up through the dirt with no help at all from me. But lots of poems, like flowers, need the support we call revision. Often, it’s pruning, so what is lovely has room to flourish, and fertilizing to add richness to the language.
Pruning, as in Wright’s wonderful example, helps me let go of expectations and just let my writing flow. I know I can go back later and get rid of all the unnecessary verbiage. For example, in my poem, “BABY!” (RENASCENCE, Yellow Arrow Journal), I wrote about my joy and wonder at the sonogram of my first grandchild. My first draft of “BABY!” started:
Rachel texts the picture today
of what will become our grandchild.
Looks like a little island
in the midst of ocean whitecaps
and BABY! with a finger pointed
to the blob, so you know
where to look.
And a thumb
holding the picture
putting its size in perspective,
this is what 11.5 cm (what it says at the top)
is – the size of a few thumbs. Her name and birthdate
I recognize. The other numbers and letters
in language you just have to trust
to the midwives.
I wrote all that to get the details down on paper. But as the poem developed, I realized what I really wanted to explore was the connection between this unborn child and my Jewish ancestors, that this child would exist only because they had escaped the pogroms of Russia. The phrase “God willing” came up—a phrase my parents and grandparents would have used. Then I knew I didn’t need all those details before I got to the heart of the poem. So (over several drafts) I revised:
Rachel sends the sonogram today
of what will become (God willing)
our grandchild.
Looks like a bean
in a soup bowl. Someone
thoughtfully wrote BABY!
with an arrow pointing to it,
to tell us where to look.
God willing isn’t something
I’m known to say, but this child . . .
Pruning isn’t usually enough; fertilizing needs to happen as well. I often need to find a richer, more musical, more powerful, or more multi-faceted way of saying something I jotted down in the first draft.
“Sunrise Sonnet for My Son,” is the last poem in my poetry book, To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press April 2022). The poem was inspired by how my son and I both found our morning chore of unloading the dishwasher to be something meditative. My first draft ended,
I think of him each morning, this son I raised, who takes joy in putting away the dishes.
I got the idea on paper, but not the poetry of it (no blame, first draft!). It needed some fertilizer. I let it sit a while, let my imagination come up with specifics that would both sound musical and enhance the imagery of the poem, and days later wound up with
this man I raised, who hums as he sorts
the silverware, noticing how each spoon shines.
There are certainly some poets who can distill the poem on the first draft and dazzle us as they share in writing sessions. But I’m so glad I didn’t toss either of these poems because they didn’t fulfill my expectations on the first try. Realizing that I can nurture the poem over time—days, weeks, months, whatever—helps me enormously to believe that my first drafts can lead to something I’m happy with. In that sense, “BABY!” could refer to the embryo of the poem as well as the one in my daughter-in-law’s womb when I wrote:
. . . I’ll send something
resembling a prayer
that it thrives in that watery mix,
that it emerges, in its time,
whole and ready . . .
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022). Her chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press. Her poetry has or will appear in Yellow Arrow, Poetry South, Poetry East, Calyx, Rise-Up Review, Quartet, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a retired educator from Maryland, now living on the North Carolina coast with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Get your copy of To Drink from a Wider Bowl at eveningstreetpress.com/book-author/joanne-durham/. Learn more about Joanne at joannedurham.com or on Instagram @poetryjoanne.
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