lenticular card

The first draft often contains another poem embedded therein, or even more than one poem partly hidden within. It’s like one of those lenticular flicker cards you used to get from a Cracker Jack box. You look at the card and you see an image, but turn the card only slightly, and a whole new image will appear.

lost articles

The poems only his notebook has known.

seizes the whole machine

I know I have a poem if I am moved in the first draft. By moved I mean choking in spots. If I don’t have this feeling I throw it away. I have, in the past, wasted months on work that began with an idea, an idea alone. Now I know, for myself at least, to let go at that point. If the first draft isn’t nerved by an emotion I didn’t know I felt, it isn’t going to be governed by any ideas I didn’t already understand before I wrote the poem. I always think of Frost saying, “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” He adds, of course, “no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” There can be something like tears blazing all over notions; ideas are vastly and deeply part of the body. A good idea seizes the whole machine. A new idea makes you physically afraid, your body changes. Hope is lodged in your skin, in your cellwork. I cannot even begin to understand the division commonly drawn (and honestly experienced by many people) between thought and emotion.

—Jorie Graham, “Pleasure,’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (Avon Book, 1985), edited by Stephen Berg.

what draft matters

There have been writers who did not believe in rewriting. They argue that the first step has been placed in the universe—it is there forever, unchangeable. But the second draft of the poem, and the third—are they not also placed in the universe? So the question of which draft is the best—that is, which moves people most strongly, seems most true—is still to be decided. The best draft may not be the first but the tenth, or the fortieth. The wish simply to speak and have it accepted as poetry is one with the child’s wish to utter a cry and be obeyed.

—Louis Simpson, “‘The Precinct Station’—Structure and Idea,” Ships Going into the Blue (The U. of Michigan Press, 1994)

fragile construct

Too fragile for its flaws, perhaps you were wise not to revise the piece.

surrounding material

Generally there is a third more material than is needed in the first draft. Think of a model airplane kit: The wing, once separated from the surrounding material, is all the wing needed to lift the aircraft.

magic in creation

Revision is difficult because all the magic is there in the first draft.

dazzle draft

Unable to see beyond the dazzle of the first draft.