541 words on my practice of writing and editing poems.

“It takes about seventy hours to drag a poem into the light.”

-MARY OLIVER

I’d have to say that Mary Oliver is correct, that is, for me. Not seventy hours in a row, of course. For me, that might be spread out over as many as fifteen years, more often over two or three years. 

I found this quote in a collection of essays by Ms. Oliver; Blue Pastures. She is writing about her use of pocket-sized notebooks, hand-sewn and well made, that she carried everywhere. She didn’t write poems in the little notebooks, just thoughts and phrases that she jotted down for later use. A darn fine practice. 

I work the other way. I keep a five by eight notebook (or larger notebook) close and when the idea hits me I just keep writing until I have a raw draft. I sit down daily at least once a day and either type the raw poems into a first draft, or edit existing poems. I don’t know exactly how many there are, but it’s in the thousands. 

I was always prolific, if not always very good. In 2008 I adopted the practice of writing a rough poem every single day. I did this for twelve years. I only missed five days across two different cases of the flu. That’s a lot of poems.

During 2020, while in the middle of the pandemic shutdown, I developed lymphedema and large ulcers broke out around my lower legs. Pain without cease. Crazy swelling. I was already in need of knee surgery and had been on a cane for about a decade. I had to elevate my legs for hours daily and wear compression bandages that could only be changed by a nurse at my hospital, 35 miles away. There were a few months that I wrote almost nothing. I did keep editing, even if some days I was mostly checking for typos. 

Eventually I beat the swelling and the ulcers, and I still wear compression socks up to my knees. And I did have that knee surgery. I am mobile again, and back to my pre-2008 practice of writing three or four new raw pieces a week. I may go back to a daily poem in time. I have a lot of notebooks handy.

I edit chronologically, in two different eras. Currently that’s 2013 and 2021. I find weird errors all the time. Spelling on newer ones, the older ones have already been edited several times, so they’ve been through spellcheck (American spelling, not British), but I do find tense mistakes in the verbs sometimes. There’s more than just mistakes, of course. I might see a need to move stanzas to a different order, lose or gain a title, decide that a poem is really two shorter poems, that two poems are really one poem, and here’s a biggy; that I’ve written the same poem twice, in two different ways.

So by the fourth or fifth draft, seventy hours of coaxing the poem into the light sounds right to me. Some people say to write when inspired, others say to use a strict practice of the same time daily. I do not see a conflict there. Do both. Quite often inspiration will strike while you’re working.

jobe