Philip Metres | March/April 2019

NOTES

1. Beyond the Narrative of Loss & Drudgery

Recently, when I asked fiction writer Derek Green for a nugget of wisdom about revision, he relayed what Caryl Phillips had told him: “you never finish a work, you only abandon it.” I’d always heard that 19^th-century French poet Paul Valery had served up this wisdom, but I discovered that it’s much older than that. Five hundred years ago, Leonardo DaVinci apparently said that “art is never finished, only abandoned.”² And probably DaVinci heard it from somebody else. No doubt, we’ll soon discover some grumpy cuneiform writer who is complaining about his busted stylus and the ending of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Revision and its discontents have been around as long as writing. Much of the talk about revision is about loss—the pain of cutting away favorite lines, stanzas, digressions, scenes, characters, etc. Of course it can hurt. We fall in love with a phrase or character, even though we may know they’re not essential. But when revising, we need to remember this truth: no one work of art needs to contain the whole universe. It just has to be a house, a little place for us to dwell in. That’s it. We are writers because we know the delight of being in the thrall of a poem or story or essay.

The prevailing wisdom about writing too often dissociates the initial magic of drafting from the cold calculation of revision. “Write drunk, revise sober,” another saying goes. Drunk writing isn’t any way to live, but the metaphor alludes to that magic state where we feel buzzed, free of self-censorship and hang-ups, and the writing seems to be writing us. We all have our rituals: coffee, a long walk, a touch of reading, a crossword puzzle. The trick is to be able to go into the trance smoothly, without much fuss.

But sometimes even first drafts feel impossible. This has also been true since the beginning. Walter Jackson Bate reminds us that even four thousand years ago, the Egyptian scribe Khakheperresenb wrung his hands over the immensity of tradition. He “still left the poignant epigraph: ‘Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which man of old has spoken.’”³ One little suggestion that I give to students struggling against the mythic beast called Writer’s Block: flow. When handwriting, flow down the page, not crossing out, and when typing, don’t use the delete key. Just flow. William Stafford alluded to “smoke’s way”—finding the cracks and crevices and move through them: “Wherever you are,” he wrote in “Smoke,” “there is a door.”⁴

But back to our “write drunk, revise sober” aphorism. In this metaphor, revision is cast as the dreaded “morning after.” It’s sad to think of writing this way: the sexy midnight eros of inspiration is replaced by the cold light of morning, where you’re hungover and trying to figure out what happened, and whether you can salvage this relationship. No wonder people hate revision! On the other hand, the difference between a dabbler and a writer may well be that writers are not into one-night stands with their work. We want a relationship, even when it’s hard. We stick it out. Make revision your best friend, as Katie Fallon recently shared. We’re faithful to the text because it has something to tell us. That it can open us.

It’s also true that wherever we are in our writing lives, we just have to play at it, to go boldly and sometimes badly. Make mistakes! Chuck Jones, the inventor of Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote, heard from his writing teacher that every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them, and the only way to get better is to draw them out. In some respects, we often feel like Wile E. Coyote, our longed-for work meep-meeping and zooming far into the distance, leaving the precarious anvil to land on our own heads.

Part of the long game of the writing life is actually just completing poems or stories, to get through to the better ones. I have certain poems that I call my “heavy bag” poems—ones that I keep going back to, but never feel like I can finish. They’re like that heavy bag that boxers use just to build their muscles. You can never knock that bag off its stand, but every punch—over days and weeks—will make you stronger.  

Perhaps a less toxic aphorism is “write hot, revise cold.” I’m thinking of Anton Chekhov’s advice to Lydia Avilova: “When you want to stir the reader to compassion, try to be cooler—to give their sorrow a background, as it were, a background, against which it can stand out in sharper relief.”⁵ What this means is that all writing is a process of expansion and contraction, of building and paring away, of heating up and cooling off.

2. What We Talk About When We Talk about Process: Or, What Picasso Can Teach Us

Most filmic representations of the artistic process involves closeups of a sweat-sheened forehead, a long-ashed cigarette between teeth, and fingers beaking at a typewriter as if it were a dead concert piano. It’s never believable. The real process is harder to see, beneath the surfaces of scowling faces and restless bodies and countless iterations on the page. One exception is the documentary film, “The Mystery of Picasso,” (1956), easily the best work on artistic process that I’ve seen. For the film, which was shot both in real time and using stop-motion progression, Picasso produced about thirty new works that were destroyed after the filming, showing yet again his profligate generativity.

Watching, for example, Picasso’s creative process for “The Death of the Bullfighter,” we observe that he had an inkling of the basic shape of the piece from the very beginning, even though it’s just an inkling. Mostly, we see Picasso relentlessly playing, swapping foregrounds and backgrounds, different colors and shapes, perspectives of both the bullfighter and the bull. Over the course of the two-plus minutes of film time, I count sixty stop-motion photographs of his progress and process. Some of his decisions ended up to be digressions, but many of them clearly built on what had come before. Yet a final surprise awaits at the very end. Just when you think the piece is complete—when the bull goring the fighter at the center of the piece seems downright pretty—Picasso twists it again. It’s at this point that the painting becomes recognizably Picasso’s. The now-cubistic perspective of the bull’s head—with its eyes as if on one plane—animates the painting, suggesting the torsional violence of the bull goring the toreador. The bull’s beauty is the nexus where ugliness, truth, beauty all come together. Picasso’s vigorous playfulness is both nimble and durable, showing us the pleasure in essaying, experimenting, and even failing.

3. One Art: or, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems Also Sucked Before They Were Good

Now, an example from poetry. Elizabeth Bishop is one of those poets rumored to have never written a bad line, much less a bad poem. Everything she published, they say, was perfect. The publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2007) opened a surprising window onto her creative process. Among many revelations of the book is the inclusion of all her drafts to “One Art,” from which my title comes.

Many of her poems took her years to complete, but “One Art,” by contrast, took her only a few weeks. According to Brett Candlish Millier, “Bishop told an interviewer that after years of trying to write [a villanelle], the poem just came to her. ‘I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter’ (Spires 1981, p. 64).⁶ A letter with seventeen drafts, perhaps.” The drafts put to bed the myth of Bishop’s perfection, if not her perfectionism. The first draft is, without question, a total mess of false starts, doodles, and shards of sentences that appears to have been written after one too many bourbons.

I can’t find a single line that she keeps for the final draft, though there are tiny phrases that are seeds of the final version. She does capture the “idea” of the poem without its real poetry here: “…want to introduce myself—I am such a / fantastic lly good at losing things / I think everyone shd. profit from my experiences.”⁷ But let’s face it: the writing is encouragingly terrible. Just think: if Elizabeth Bishop could write that and not immediately want to drown herself, maybe we don’t have to lose heart at our abysmal first drafts either.

 

By the second draft, she’s already locked into the villanelle form as the expression of this “art of losing,” and just a couple weeks later, she’s arrived at the final draft.

(Draft of “One Art” from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn.  Copyright © 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel.  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.⁸

The point is, darlings, everybody sweats. And art—not to mention the art of living—is about finding the right grip between holding on and letting go.

4. In Which We Learn Frank is Not an Asshole; or at least George Saunders Doesn’t Think So

The short film, “On Story,” about George Saunders and process, invites us into an idea of writing that emphasizes embracing the unknown journey of a story. By bypassing the desire to overcontrol a plot and just listening to characters as they emerge, we can move intuitively and relationally, paying attention to our discontent with our initial drafts. In his example, Saunders begins with the sentence: “Frank is an asshole.” He then moves toward describing how Frank is an asshole, and finally just abandons the first half of the sentence and leaves the angry action: “Frank snapped at the barista.” But why, he wonders. Perhaps “because she reminded him of his dead wife, whom he dearly loved.” And suddenly, Saunders notes, he feels as if Frank is leading him into this story.

Fiction writing, for Saunders, is a relationship with our characters. On some level, it’s like the way that we relate to the people we love: “You come back to them again and again and try to intuit their real expansiveness, and you try to keep them close to you, you try to give them the benefit of the doubt... Revision is a form of active love.”⁹

5. How to Recover from PTWD (Post-Traumatic Workshop Disorder) and Write Again

After my first workshops, I remember feeling paralyzed by the dozen copies of my poem critiqued by classmates and teacher. Readers often would contradict each other about what they liked and what to change. I didn’t really know whose advice to take, or why. As a writer, your job is not to please everyone by making the revisions suggested. The whole point of critique is to accelerate your revision process—to activate the “re-visioning,” seeing your work from the outside. What follows is a list of revision practices that have worked for me, more or less in order of process. They mostly refer to writing poems, though some will apply to writing stories as well.

1. Move toward the work as it reveals itself. Revision isn’t “editing” or “fixing.” Your work is not full of mistakes, and it’s not broken. It’s just not itself yet. Audre Lorde: “to make the poem more of what it needs to be.”¹⁰ Perhaps we are mediums, not masters, trying to catch birds with our words that approximate music. Writers are perennial amateurs, with the joy and angst of Beginner’s Mind nearly all the time. In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young writes: “A few years ago Robert Hass said to me, I still don’t know what I’m doing, at which point it occurred to me that not knowing what we’re doing is obviously the thing to do. So how does one get better at not knowing what one is doing?”¹¹ It rhymes with Rumi’s 13^th-century wisdom: “sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”¹²

2. Be wary of intention and trust a new direction. The workshop should help you begin to see and hear the “big picture” of your poem or story. The comments should tell you whether the language has the effect you desire. When readers articulate the central drama in a way that’s different from our intention, we have two choices. One, recognize that we have a lot of work to do to get the work to manifest that original intention. Or two, move toward the poem that is emerging, the one that will surprise you in its unfolding, because it’s gone a different direction. I’ve heard fiction writers talk about the moment when their main characters starts to talk to them. I love hearing novelists talk about their characters as if they were alive. Meet them in their aliveness. Okay, you might have to put them up in the tree, but eventually, they’ll talk to you. Robert Frost: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.”¹³

3. Bullets and fires and birds. Just remember: the trigger—what inspired the work—is not the bullet. We’re after the bullet. Or rather: once the fire is blazing, fuck the match. Don’t confuse the match (the inspiration) with the fire (the work’s full brightness and heat). To use a less violent image, as Dean Young wrote, “WE’RE MAKING BIRDS NOT BIRDCAGES.”¹⁴ When I’m scared to change something, I save the present file and call it “[title] experimental.” Nearly 100% of the time, that version becomes the real version.

4. Drafts are etudes. Print up (and rename as word files) all your drafts. (Organization is important.) Painter, do your etudes. Each draft is a study before the final painting. Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. You’re trying things out. For this reason, I personally love to work on multiple pieces and in different genres at the same time. I’ve read somewhere that John Updike actually had three typewriters in different rooms in his house where he was working on different pieces. When he tired of one, he got up and went into another room.

5. Let it be (but also become a regular guest). Put it away. Let it cool off. Time helps, and reading something else can clear your head. But I mean laying a draft aside for more than a night can do wonders. A week or more will clear your eyes and help you see the piece as it is. While a draft rediscovered years later can be a delight to work with, it’s also true that if you visit your work on a regular basis, you’ll have more chances to nurture that growing thing. Tyehimba Jess writes: “I hang my poems on the wall so that I walk around my apartment in constant conversation with them throughout their manifestations from revision to revision. Every time I pass by a poem, I get another chance to talk to it and listen to the way it moves.”¹⁵

6. Hanwriting and typing and speaking. Try alternating between handwriting and typing your poems. You’re accessing different parts of thinking and body when you do it. As Christopher Bakken shared, “I feel like the slow physical work of the pen asks me to gnaw each letter, syllable, word, clause.”¹⁶ And read your poems aloud. You’d be amazed how quickly a phrase reveals its weakness when it hangs in the air. Russian poet Sergey Gandlevsky actually composes his poems in his head, line by line, as he walks around Moscow. 

7. Find the form. By finding the form, I don’t mean your poem must be a villanelle, just that the form should be in relationship to the content. Whether you feel that “form is never more than an extension of content” (Robert Creeley)¹⁷, or that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” (Robert Frost)¹⁸, we know that poetry finally expresses itself in form. Your formal choices (whether received or organic forms, line lengths, stanzas, or employment of the page as open field) should work to heighten the content in some way.

8. How you frame a thing. Is your title anchoring your reader, and does it add something essential? I once heard advice that you can pluck a phrase around 3-5 lines from the end, and somehow it will speak to the whole. In Russian poetry, for example, most poems have no title; do American poems have titles because of our fetish for packaging and convenience? Whatever the reason, a good title can allow the reader to leap straight in and spare us the setup.

9. Beginnings. Does the work begin in the right place, where the conflict/predicament/central drama reveals itself? To avoid the “throat clearing” phenomenon, try beginning with line four. Does it end in the right place, where things might not yet be resolved but something has come to resolution? Try ending it three lines early. What happens then?

Most of the time, writing looks like striking flint against stone, hoping our paltry sparks will yield to a raging fire. How rare it is to receive the lightning bolt!

10. Dizzy up the line. Take all the line breaks out and then re-lineate. If your lines are longer, they mean something different than if they are shorter, even if the words are the same. I love lineation and enjambment so much that I almost always feel bittersweet reading a prose poem. There’s just so much swagger and sway in a lithe enjambment, so much eros. Check out Rebecca Hazelton’s “Learning the Poetic Line” to explore this further.¹⁹ Within lines, we can dizzy up the meanings or syntax by juggling words or even swapping them out, using procedures such as the well-known Oulipian N+7, whereby a noun is swapped for one seven nouns away in the dictionary. The same can be done with verbs.

11. Renovating your rooms. You may know that the word stanza comes from the Italian word for “room” or “stopping place.” Traditionally, stanzas were organizers to suggest shifts of time, place or idea. Today, stanzas are often ruined rooms, both closed and open to the elements of the poem. Try your poem in quatrains, then try it in tercets. See what lines immediately become unnecessary. If you need more radical renovation, cut your poem up, juggle the order of stanzas. Chance operations can sometimes yield surprising connections.

12.  The return trail and other switchbacks. Write the lines in reverse order, if only to see what happens. Oliver de la Paz, in his lovely “Thirteen Things to Do to the Poem You’ve Already Written,”²⁰ calls the reverse ordering technique “the return trail”—as if we’re heading back down the mountain we’ve written. Relatedly, Joanna Klink (via Sarah Gridley) advises to “find the line that feels most wide open and becomes your closing line. The line that comes after it becomes the opening line of the poem, and you read down and loop back to the top until you hit upon that closing line.”²¹

13. The Condensery. Some of us over-write, some of us under-write, and most of us do both. The art of losing requires pressure on the words to see what’s essential. Lorine Niedecker called her poetic practice “the condensery,” and that feels right to me. Sarah Gridley asks students “to do a word count, then asks them to first decrease the poem by 30%; then increase it by 30%. The former makes them discover what is ‘non-negotiable’ content. The latter can be interesting—writing beyond what you thought you had to say. And of course, the increase might then prompt further decrease.”²²

14. Adjectives and adverbs. The more I write poetry, the less I trust adjectives and adverbs. After getting tired of reading pallid verb/adverb combinations like “walk slowly” in student poems, I shuffled over to the Thesaurus and found amble, drag, flounder, lumber, lurch, meander, plod, ramble, saunter, shamble, schlepp, slog, stroll, traipse, tramp, tread, and trudge. It’s not that using the most vivid word is always superior. But we should know the range of possibilities, and to surprise ourselves with the word-hoard of this tongue.

15. Let your darlings leave. Everyone knows Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 advice to “murder your darlings.”²³ Revision can feel like a kind of killing. But probably it’s only the balloon of our egos being punctured. How about, bid your lovelies to go off on their own, to be their own people. If you love them, you listen, accompanying them on their journey, even if you wanted them to turn out differently. What lines do you just like, and which vibrate toward the heart, the core of the work? If it’s not tethered to the center, let it fly away.

16. Practice Wabi-sabi. The Japanese aesthetic principle that art should embrace imperfection and transience invites us to imagine that what makes a work of art complete can also be a flaw. There is such a thing as over-revising, smoothing out all the edges, all the daring of a work of art. Tolstoy was known to deliberately muss up his syntax and phrasing in what would come to be called ostranenie (estrangement), if only to try to surprise himself. There’s also the story of chance “wabi-sabi,” concerning an incident with Marcel Duchamp’s large glass sculpture “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.” Duchamp had struggled to finish the work, and thought it should remain unfinished. But when it was being moved for an exhibition, some workers mishandled it, cracking the glass. He was said to have exclaimed: “now it is complete!” Looking at it, and thinking of the traumatic story that it tells, I think he’s absolutely right. “There is crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen sings, “that’s how the light gets in.”²⁴

17. Turning endings (the door opening outward). Ending a poem is almost as hard as beginning one. Poetic Closure (1968) by Barbara Hernnstein Smith, observes that the most basic way to end a poem is to break a pattern that the poem has established—whether that pattern is meter, rhyme, or sound.²⁵ I love the idea of the “turn,” the volta, something that began with the sonnet form, where the poem engages in a reversal of some kind. Still, to my ear, Shakespeare’s sonnet endings often feel forced and too neat. Of course, anti-closure has been the modern poetic standard for ending poems for so long that we almost come to expect a poem that resists easy closure. The volta is, of course, also seen in stories, where plot twists move us into unexpected positions, but end up seeming logical, if we’d read the signs earlier. Brian Tierney shares that “Tracy K. Smith once told me to think about poem endings as a door opening outward… The advice made me wonderfully wary of closing the loop, or ‘punctuating’ the train of thought or the rhythm.”²⁶

18. Holy doubt and get by with a little help from your friends. Remember, doubt is part of the process of writing—not knowing where it’s going or whether it (and we) will amount to anything. Richard Bausch has written about the time that a writer had his wife lock him in his writing room, where he could be heard crying: “Let me out. I’m a fraud. I never could do this.”²⁷ That writer was Joseph Conrad, and he’d already written Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. If Joseph Conrad believed he was a fraud, then it’s okay to feel that way too. Sometimes your friends are there to lock you in your room, to complete the work. Sometimes they are there to set you free. All you need is one or two friends who love you and can help you see the truth about your work.

19. Let go (don't be like bonnard). At some point, you have to let go. For some, that’s hard. Impressionist artist Pierre Bonnard was known to have gone into an art museum, with brushes and paint stowed inside his coat, to paint a bit on works already hanging in the collection. Mike Croley likes to tell students to stop getting in the way of their story. They want to control every aspect and not let their characters do what they need to do. Let things unfold, but also let them end. Miles Davis (from Ed Pavlic): “play what you know and finish before you’re done.”²⁸ Know, too, as Dave Lucas shared with me, the work of art is a pilgrimage, and as on a pilgrimage, you crawl the last mile.

20. Is it good (beautiful, truthful, and needful)? Finally, Jane Hirshfield (thanks Sarah Gridley) offers an interesting question for writers: Is it ethical? In a time when we are deluged with writing and representations of all sorts, it’s okay to hit the pause button and ask whether our work is good and can do good. After all, art has harmed, diminished, and erased people for just as long as it has healed, raised, and remembered. Why not ask ourselves: are we ushering forth something good and necessary in the world?

I’ve written poems that have taken ten minutes to unfold, and poems that have taken me ten years. I learned so much about poetry from “Ashberries: Letters,” a poem that began in fall of 1992, inspired by living in Russia. It didn’t find its final form until 2000, when it was finally picked up by New England Review and then Best American Poetry. It began as a love poem, measuring the distance between the speaker and the beloved, encountering a strange and distant place. Yet something was missing. Countless drafts could not uncover it. At last, I recalled a moment where I’d been completely lost, the terror of that feeling, and finally saw that the poem had excised the very reason for its being: that I was afraid in this other country, constantly getting lost in language and strange streets, and terrified that I’d lose myself and this loved one entirely in the process. In retrospect, what was missing was so obvious. But it took years for me to see it, and to let that feeling in.

Sometimes we spend a day moving the placement of one word. It sounds agonizing, but I have a draft in which I made that one small shift. Yet I don’t remember suffering that day at all. If anything, that little move was a bit of clarity. That passing thought that solidified into action on a day where I was working on a number of poems. Most of the time, writing looks like striking flint against stone, hoping our paltry sparks will yield to a raging fire. How rare it is to receive the lightning bolt!

A few years ago, I began to write a memoir, now called The More You Love the Motherland, out of the uneasy sense that my lifetime of poems about Russia hadn’t captured everything about that time and place. At last, I thought, I would finally say everything. I would capture Russia! But after three years of working on it and enduring a revision where I had to cut 20,000 words, a realization struck me: what I’m doing, in narrative, is a kind of lie. I can’t capture everything. Life is bigger than us. And that’s okay. We don’t have to be God or Tolstoy. We just have to be present to the work and move where it’s going.

Looking back at these twenty tips again, I’m wary about their assertions and wonder about revising or cutting half of them. Since I’ve been reading and writing long enough to see several coteries and period styles rise and fall, I worry that I’m merely echoing the doxa I’ve been immersed in. Yet this is the water that I find myself in, for better or worse. Between the Scylla of tradition and the Charybdis of originality, we swim. In the end, I agree with Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town: “You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say… is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you.  Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you.”²⁹ To echo Whitman: “dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”³⁰

And we would do well to remember Audre Lorde’s conclusion to “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” concerning what all of this writing might be for: “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.”³¹ Sometimes I feel as if I’m not a writer at all, just a listener, and the ancestors are rising inside me, speaking something that needs hearing. All I have to do is be still enough, and incline toward it.

Beloveds, bow before the unknowing. Fall into it. Stand up. Fall harder. Rise again. Fall deeper. Rise again. Stay inside the den of those voices. Listen. Build just one room. Lift it around you, until you can stand inside it or lie down flat. Until you can walk around inside it. Until you can find the corners of it. Maybe it is bigger than a house. Share it to shelter others. Maybe it’s another country, the country of the imagination. May we find refuge in it. May it outlive us.

 

Philip Metres has written ten books, including Sand Opera and The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance. Awarded the Lannan Fellowship and two Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

Notes

1. Special thanks to Christopher Bakken, Richard Bausch, Rose Berger, Michael Croley, Oliver de la Paz, Aubrey Hirsch, Tyehimba Jess, Katie Fallon, Derek Green, Sarah Gridley, Joy Katz, Mina Khan, Dave Lucas, Nyla Matuk, Ed Pavlic, Nomi Stone, and Brian Tierney, among many others, for sharing their revision suggestions.
2. “Talk: Leonardo da Vinci.” Wikiquote. Accessed August 5, 2018. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Leonardo_da_Vinci
3. Jackson W. Bate. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), pp. 3–4.
4. Kim Stafford. Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (St. Paul: Graywolf Press), p. 127.
5. Lillian Helman, ed. The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 163.
6. Brett Candlier Millier. “Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art.’” New England Review. Volume 13.2 (Winter 1990), p. 123.
7. Elizabeth Bishop. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), Appendix.
8. Ibid., p. 198.
9. Tom Mason and Sarah Klein. “On Story.” Vimeo. Thursday, October 26, 2017. YouTube, Month day, year posted. Video, 7:01. https://vimeo.com/240038052.
10. Audre Lorde. Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New. (New W.W. Norton, 1992), p. xiv.
11. Dean Young. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2010), p. 89.
12. ?al?l al-D?n Rumi, E.H. Whinfield. Masnavi i Ma’navi: The Spiritual Couplets of Maulána Jalálu-’d-Dín (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co, 1898), p. 191.
13. Robert Frost. The Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose. (New York: Macmillan, 2002),  p. 440.
14. Dean Young. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2010), p. 47.
15. Tyehimba Jess. Facebook message. August 5, 2018.
16. Christopher Bakken. Facebook post. August 4, 2018.
17. Poetry Foundation website. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-creeley Accessed August 6, 2018.
18. Robert Frost. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Frost. Accessed August 6, 2018.
19. Rebecca Hazelton. “Learning the Poetic Line.” Poetry Foundation web site. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70144/learning-the-poetic-line. Accessed August 6, 2018.
20. Oliver De La Paz. “Thirteen Things to Do to the Poem You’ve Already Written.” Skagit River Poetry Foundation web site. https://www.skagitriverpoetry.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Thirteen-Things-to-Do-Re-Vision.pdf. Accessed August 6, 2018.
21. Sarah Gridley. Email. July 25, 2018.
22. Ibid.
23. Arthur Quiller-Couch. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Quiller-Couch. August 6, 2018.
24. Leonard Cohen. “Anthem.” https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/anthem.html. Accessed August 6, 2018.
25. Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
26. Brian Tierney. Facebook post. August 4, 2018.
27. Karen. Write Despite Blog. February 7, 2017. https://writedespite.org/2017/02/07/deep-in-the-rewrite-trenches-a-little-inspiration-from-author-richard-bausch/. Accessed August 6, 2018.
28. Ed Pavlic. Facebook post. August 4, 2018.
29. Richard Hugo. The Triggering Town 9New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 3.
30. Walt Whitman. “Preface 1855.” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 622.
31. Audre Lorde. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” On Being website. https://onbeing.org/blog/poetry-is-not-a-luxury-by-audre-lorde/ Accessed August 6, 2018.