Note to self: the stanza is your friend

I’ve doing a lot of revision lately – and I’m still enjoying the work of revision almost more than the work of creating new poems – and most of the revisions involve major changes to the form of the poems: breaking long free form poems into shorter stanzas, making each stanza a self-contained unit. Exercising this control tightens the poems, forces me to find the overarching idea and how each stanza contributes – or does not – to the development of that idea. It’s been wonderful, exciting. I even revised a poem using the “many two-line stanzas” form I’ve been seeing everywhere and, frankly, am skeptical of. But over the weekend I used it on a poem that’s been giving me trouble since the summer and wow, did it really turn the poem around. Forced me to cut extraneous language, tighten the narrative, hone the language; there is a growing tension now as the work progresses to the final stand-alone line. Okay, I get it. I still think it’s a form that should be used sparingly, but I get it now.

This is the work of revision, the hard glorious work of revision.

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