Poetry Week Day Four: Expect Failure

Poetry is considered one of the highest art forms, second only to music. Its capacity to evoke universal emotions is rare and precious. It’s not easy to achieve that much power. The average poem consists of 170 words. That’s twice the length of this paragraph. Novelists get 80,000 words to make an impact, and poets only get a couple of hundred. That means every single word counts. Extraneous language must be removed. If a word isn’t performing several jobs at once, it’s probably not good enough to exist in a poem. If a word isn’t performing any jobs, it’s definitely not good enough to exist in a poem.

This is why it takes some of us years to complete a poetry collection: Every single word must be weighed and measured over and over again. Poetry is not the stuff of laziness. The first draft is usually little more than a hunk of clay. It must be sculpted, painted, and varnished. You will go back to every poem many times before deeming it complete.

This might sound intimidating, but if you love words, it can be a rewarding experience. I promise. Ask me. I’ve been busy with a collection since 2011.

Yes, really.

And one of the saddest moments is when a collection is published and you can no longer work on it.

One collection is about 100 poems long, at an average of 170 words a piece. In total, that’s 1700 words—the length of four pages of a novel. That should tell you how much editing you should be doing. I return to my work more often than most, but my career poet friends usually take about a year or two to produce the same kind of collection.

In other words, if you’re posting the first draft of a poem, consider it the first step. Conscious crafting must come next. Then you must shear away extraneous language. You must workshop each edit. You must substitute each lazy word.

Nobel Prize winner, J.M Coetzee, once did a radio interview on his novel, Disgrace. I’ll never forget that interview because he could justify every single comma he’d used. I learned how exacting writers needed to be that day, and I’ve been using the lesson ever since.

I’m not trying to scare you away, I promise. Quite the opposite. I’m trying to prevent you from losing your nerve when you receive a less-than-stellar critique on a first or even third draft. It is normal to have a wreck of a draft. My first drafts are wreckage, too. Even the most seasoned poets mess this up, so expect “failure.” Don’t call it “failure,” though. Call it the beginning. That’s exactly what it is.

Today’s prompt should make you miserable: Take one of your first drafts and rework it. Post your second drafts in the workshop. Yay. How many of you will do it? Maybe one. It’s okay. I won’t whine.