Chris Abani
A poem, like a photograph, is an image that transcends, not only the limited context of its making, but also the limits of its individual material components. It has a specificity of sight and seeing that reaches beyond its frame to allow the viewer access to multiple narratives: the one that the photographer is framing, but also the flexibility to bring their own contextual narratives to the image. This leads to a much more complex engagement.
An early draft of a poem can be likened to a snapshot. A snapshot is an image that has no connection to us beyond the representation of its particular moment. This means that its emotional impact and meaning relies on our prior access to the exact details of the moment. Imagine say, encountering a random snapshot of some stranger’ s child. It leaves nothing for the viewer to grab onto unless they know the child or the parent. It holds nothing beyond the materials of composition. It is a direct referent to a direct experience which means it has no enduring quality beyond your own nostalgia.
The process of revision takes a snapshot and renders it into the timeless expansiveness of a photograph. So first accept that the first four to seven drafts are notes for the poem. It takes time to truly understand what a poem can reach for. So time is an important element, so take time to truly engage with edits: put the draft aside for a moment; then push the poem to the point of fatigue; next, find the right balance between the narrative line and the lyric dip—between ambiguity and tension, which is to say the balance between music and meaning. If we can achieve this one thing we will have made a remarkable poem.
< draft >
< draft >
Dirty laundry
Jim and I were taking lunch below the dam sharing a crumpled bag of gold fish when we met Bill & Mike. Their window rolled down next to our truck so they had to strain their necks—looking over me—to introduce themselves to Jim. They have the same face when I remember them. Two guns propped between seats & a smell from the old engine. Black tarp over lumps in the bed. What’ve you got back there, Jim asked. They stepped out & when they undid a knot something hit dirt on the opposite side of the truck. You might not want to see, Bill looked at me before pulling the tarp off. I said I wanted to & they opened the pile was grey-white, at first I thought dirty laundry. At least eighty seagulls just dead. Shot so their shoulders folded apart like wet book covers. Another plan to save salmon. We laughed. Gulls flew over 200 miles inland for reeking chunks of fish shot out by the dams. At least you get a dream job out of it, Jim said. Being paid to hunt. On the pile I noticed a twisted garbage bag. Bill slid it down, cut the top & lifted an adult heron. We moved close to him. She was hit by a hatchery cannon near the juvenile ponds, he explained. Not us, just figured we’d pick her up. I could look through her body at the truck. Chest blown out in the shape of a bowling ball. The rest intact—eyes cranked open, neck coiled tight over her slaty back. When I cried it made them comfortable like I was a daughter or a wife or something they knew how to see. Hands on my back. Why does this one make you sad? Don’t you care about the gulls, or were they too ugly?
< REVISION >
There Are Always Bodies in The Swamp
After Al Sadiq Al-Raddi
The birds we shot for our manhood stifle our mouths,
feathers as alphabets, beaks as words. In this train car,
open windows augur the hope of raw sunlight.
I think silence is our first breach as men, a thread
stitching our jaws closed like the dead.
If we are blessed, we snag an edge and unravel in
language and desire. If we voyage, brother, and we
must, what is beyond impulse? There is
something like avoidance here, the fear of meaning, a
cartography trod in poems, a pilgrimage in song.
I tap a boiled egg on the window ledge, peel and eat. Shells
patterned in a salted and sharp light.
Walcott in my lap reads: slowly my body grows,
a single sound, slowly I become a bell.
Taneum Bambrick
At first, I didn’t trust any of the forms I was using. I wanted each form to mirror, somehow, the experience of being held within a power structure. I pushed this particular poem in and out of different prose forms for five years. It was once a three-page essay. It was once only a couple of sentences about the plight of seagulls and salmon around the Columbia River. Eventually, I realized I was resisting the story the poem wanted to tell, which was actually a story about gender in working class spaces, and about the ways in which people are made to serve systems that are violent towards the environment. It is also a poem of complicity and self-critique: the speaker has to face her own values where they are demonstrated on the bodies of shot birds. I couldn’t write this poem until I could think of myself as both a victim and a perpetrator, which required distance from the experience itself. It fell into its final form when I decided that I wanted to try to write a poem that utilized lineation, white space, dialogue, and exposition at the same time. I wanted to both see and push my own limits on the line, because I am as invested in that experimentation of form as I am in challenging myself to tell a full story.
*
This poem was originally published in Cutbank online.
< REVISION >
BIOLOGICAL CONTROL TASK
we were taking lunch, sharing a crumpled
bag of goldfish below the dam
when we met Bill and Mike.
They rolled down a window, pulled up
next to our truck and strained
their necks—looking over me
—to introduce themselves to Jim.
They have the same face when I remember them.
Two guns propped between seats,
smell from the old engine.
Tarp over a load in the bed.
What’ve you got? Jim asked.
They stepped out, undid a rope.
Something soft hit
dirt on the opposite side of the truck.
You might not wanna look. Bill glanced at me,
slid the tarp off. The mound there
was grey and white at first I thought
dirty laundry.
At least eighty seagulls just dead,
ropes of blood at the chests. Shot so
their shoulders folded apart
like wet book covers.
To protect salmon.
Doesn’t make sense, but it’s not bad
getting paid to hunt. Mike motioned to a trash bag on the pile.
Show them our girl.
Bill drew it down, ripped the knot, lifted
an adult heron with a hole blown
out the chest.
He held both webbed feet.
You could look through her body.
We found her in the road. Hit
by a hatchery cannon.
The bird seemed frozen,
wrongly intact—gold eyes cranked
open, neck coiled tight over her slaty back.
When I cried it made them comfortable like I could be
a daughter, wife or something they knew how to see.
Hands on my back.
What’s the matter, Mike asked. Didn’t you care
about the gulls or were they too ugly?
Geffrey Davis
The day that my dear friend James introduced me to fly-fishing at night, my most enduring and important pastime was made intensely unfamiliar and suddenly terrifying, in part by taking away (and exposing) my dependency on sight for my sense of success and safety when out on the water. Angling in the dark forced me to confront the thinness of my connection to fly-fishing’s other core literacies: timing and feeling.
For months I pried at this poem’s central imagery, its suggestions, its formal habits, its pacing, &c., trying to discover the truth behind the triggering subject—being invited and guided through an immersion into the deeply known made deeply unknown. Typically, that’s my process: round after round of revisions, until the poem begins to withstand or stops responding to my next best question. That includes exploring the poem’s critical or philosophical interventions: what kind of community can two people make? what togetherness can I claim through the dark? how much of my nighttime fear is about loneliness? what good does absence do to my sense of belonging? And that includes asking which formal qualities deepen, worry, or reveal something particular or ineffable about the poem’s psychic expression. I wondered whether a POV shift from public (“us/we”) to personal (“me/I”) could push the speaker to confront the poem’s private struggles. And I experimented with a line and stanzaic structure that would effectively represent the voice’s uncertain travel through this poem’s literal and internal landscape—un-patterned and imbalanced couplets organized according to the difficult music of slanted rhyme; a stumbling continuous form that troubled the use of white space; terse lines committed to an enjambed togetherness of the couplet; &c.
Through dozens of drafts I found that this real life experience was primarily offering me an opportunity to complicate an understanding of my own precarious claims on community or belonging or friendship. And I still see those at play, but it wasn’t until my son showed up in the poem and I realized I had already decided to invite my child into a fear that I didn’t (and might never) fully understand. Only then did the poem turn on for me and, soon after, find its lasting form. Each previous draft, however, confirmed or tracked something essential—language, imagery, tension—back to the final version.
*
“The Night Angler” first appeared in A Poetry Congeries
< DRAFT >
THE NIGHT ANGLERS
Headlamps guide us through September
fields of corn, quiet and hefty
in waders, over the thin length of a rail-
road bridge, around dense patches of poison
ivy, briars—all the way to the river’s sudden
edge, but no further. We kill the lamps
and stand beside the long, low pool, waiting
for our eyes to give up on squeezing
for more light. The moment we can catch
some of the moon’s blues albedo
in the leaves overhead, we slip into the still
glass water, where we know the fish of dreams
stalk the shallows, prowling for small fish.
You know this river best and take the lead,
starting your cloaked cast toward the far bank.
I am all ear, all fixed on the sound
of your wild streamer sailing back and forth
through the night. The splash it finally makes
could be miles away, or feet, in the distance,
my senses tensed with the old anticipation,
my mind straining to give shape to your own
sharp waiting, which I can’t see but know
holds, only yards beyond my reach,
knee-deep in darkness. When your first
few casts turn up nothing, I hear you sigh
and slide further down the pool, making room
for me to send my own asking out
into the dark, and something in me wants
to call this the tribe—this blind stripping in
of line, this hard-won togetherness, measured
vibrations traveling through slow water—
we work to catch the attention of something
large and hungry, something eager
to swallow, with need, what we offer.
< FINAL VERSION >
THE NIGHT ANGLER
for J
Keetje Kuipers
There are the poems I write that come out nearly whole in the first draft. A verb sharpened here, an adjective axed there—and it’s done. These are rare. They come almost never, and they are the best of the poems I write. Then there are the vast majority of what makes it to publication: poems I put through countless drafts, landing at something often unrecognizable in relation to its origins, but strong and sturdy and right for the working over it’s received. And then there is one more kind of poem, the rarest breed of all. These are the ones I’ve worked and worked and might have abandoned, perhaps ought to have abandoned, had something at their core not meant so much to me. These poems may never be the best of what I write, but they are the ones I treasure most.
This was the case as I revised one small poem over the three years following my wedding. I had never anticipated having a wedding, and so when I did get married—in a tiny, queer, Quaker ceremony in a cabin in Montana—I perhaps had a lot of catching-up thinking to do about it afterwards: What did it mean to marry a woman after living so much of my romantic life in relationships with men? What did it mean to commit myself to another person when I had finally made peace with the idea that I was never meant to have one singular partner? For years I had staked my whole being on my independence, and now I had pledged myself to someone else forever. I had either been wrong before—about my sexuality, my identity, my (in)ability to yoke my life to another’s—or I was dead wrong now. As is so often the case when I’m writing something where the rhetorical stakes are high, this poem could only exist as a sonnet, though it didn’t begin that way. The constraints of the form worked not only to force me to be more rigorous with the poem—rigorous with every single unnecessary syllable—but the rhyme encouraged me to reconsider the argument at its center. Was I being blind to what was behind my mind? Maybe what was new was the thing that was actually true? I couldn’t quit this poem because I couldn’t quit these questions.
This poem went through many permutations. I used an early version of it for a panel at AWP on how not to write a poem, and then I sent versions of it out to magazines for a long time, always tinkering, always reconsidering, always moving it one step closer to what it wanted to be. And I got it almost all the way there on my own. But it wasn’t until Jericho Brown considered it for The Believer that the final missing pieces of this poem fell into place. His comments pushed the poem, or a version of it I might have resigned myself to after 36 months of almost-good-enough, just a little bit further until—as he himself put it when discussing his own work of revision in this very magazine—it could sing. Much like my marriage, this poem is finally what it—and what I—was always meant to be.
< DRAFT >
SHOOTING CLAY PIGEONS AFTER THE WEDDING
The shotgun
felt right
notched
in my shoulder
shrugged out
now
from tight
layers of silk
and lace
I’d left
behind me—
absent
jet’s trail
holding
my place.
Instead:
snow-swept
valley floor,
rabbits
I’d been told
not to
aim lead at
skittering
across the glass
frosting of it.
And above us disc
after gold clay disc
shot up
into the clarity
of a something
blue sky.
I was
doing it
by instinct—not
thought, not
even heart.
I wanted more
than anything
to be
a natural.
I wanted
for it
to be true.
< REVISION >
SHOOTING CLAY PIGEONS AFTER THE WEDDING
Up the snow-slicked hill, the truck’s tracks behind
us like the drag of our twin wedding trains,
until through the something-blue windowpane
the valley floor opened, clear as my mind
just after I’d lifted your veil’s tulle blind.
The shotgun’s recoil shivered its dull pain,
and yet what pleasure taking my sure aim
as disk after gold clay disk flew and whined.
I held my breath and the gun like a man,
shattering the altar of cloud-laced sky.
I was doing it by instinct—that new
muscle near my heart. I wanted more than
anything to be a natural. I
wanted more than anything to be true.
Angela Narciso Torres
Five years elapsed between this poem’s first draft and its revision. (Fortunately, not all my poems take this long to revise!) Some poems simply take time. As Mary Ruefle said in a recent interview, “Patience is required in poetry, as in all things.” A poem may need time to percolate, to ripen, to reach full maturity, apart from you—or you, from it.
I started this poem a few years after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Before her illness, she was the family powerhouse, the keeper and teller of stories, the life of any gathering. She was a well-loved physician, a beautiful pianist, and a great cook. To my mother, food was a language of love. Writing this poem was a way of preserving the mother I knew before the onset of this terrible disease. I hoarded the stories she repeated, the recipes she knew by heart, her favorite songs, her rituals and anxieties, and her unique expressions of love, imperfect as they were.
Given my original intention for the poem, it’s easy to see why the first draft is clunky and discursive. I was obsessed with keeping everything; it was hard to let go. I wasn’t ready to “murder my darlings.” I think this reflected, in part, my denial of the disease that was stealing the best parts of my mother.
One of the gifts of time is emotional distance. Returning to this poem years later, I realized that to make the poem work I needed to glean what was sharpest and most compelling, allowing the extraneous to fall away. The process was akin to erasure: subtracting what was not the poem. I allowed elisions between time and narrative moments, forgoing logic for associative leaps and resisting the urge to over explain. I let the poem say only what it needed; leaving space for ambiguity.
Putting the poem in tercets helped. Sometimes, the use of form allows us to approach emotionally charged material with greater objectivity and restraint. Also, I tried to employ repetition more deliberately, as a kind of refrain (“Carmen… ,” “The sweetest meat . . .”). This helped achieve cohesion and a desired balance between what a teacher referred to as “sources of order and sources of chaos.”
“A poem is like a genie in a bottle,” someone once said. “The bottle only makes the genie stronger.”
*
“Sundowning” originally appeared in Missouri Review.
< DRAFT >
SUNDOWNING
The sweetest meat clings to the bone, my mother says, knifing her beefsteak.
When her mother left nights to play mahjong, she cried herself to sleep—got blamed for her mother’s bad hand. Unlucky tears!
Carmen. Lucky charm on my tongue.
The sweetest meat—, she begins at dinner, tearing a chicken wing. Will she remember this come morning?
She remembers how an aunt said—if you play with matches at night, you’ll wet the bed.
Named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel, she pinned the brown scapulars under our shirts. In tropical heat, the wool squares stuck to our chests like stamps.
Carmen. A prayer beneath the breath.
Amid potted ferns, she crouches over puzzle pieces. Bizet on the stereo.
Unable to sleep when my father worked late, she made me lie next to her. My brothers played ball on moonlit streets. My legs twitched, a broken clock.
Her kisses, ripe guava and rust.
Only devotion can save you.
She remembers kundimans her mother sang. Dahil Sa Iyo. Saan Ka Man Narooroon.
Carmen. Gypsy fire.
Sunday morning, she fingers puzzle pieces. Maria Callas on the stereo.
When she sits at the piano, the lovebirds fall silent. Alabaster eggs tremble in a glass bowl.
Afternoons, I take siesta with her. My friends climbing santol trees in the back.
Some days she woke with an urge to bite the brown loaf of my arm. The marks on my flesh, undecipherable runes. Exquisite scars.
The sweetest meat clings—, she declares over lunch, peeling a soft mango.
When she leaves, I follow the scent of carnations back to her room. I dab L’air du Temps where the blood pulses.
L’amour. Only devotion will save you.
At breakfast I tell her I’m leaving on the red-eye. By noon, she’ll forget.
But she remembers every note of the kundiman. Over and over, she plays them. Nasaan Ka Irog?
Carmen. Vermilion sky. God’s vineyard.
Before you go, I want to give you something. To remember. From a shelf she takes a mug, thimble-sized, embossed with the map of Cuba.
In a dream, a long-dead aunt pours her rosary into my mother’s hands. Upon waking she finds two dried up bees in her palm.
My mother has never been to Cuba.
< REVISION >
SUNDOWNING
for my mother, Carmen
The sweetest meat clings to the bone,
my mother says, knifing her steak.
Carmen. Silver spade on my tongue.
Mahjong nights, her mother and father gone,
she cried herself to sleep. Blamed in the morning
for her mother’s losing hand. Unlucky tears!
The sweetest—she begins at dinner,
tearing off a chicken leg. What
will she recall by morning?
Named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
she pinned brown scapulars under our shirts,
wet stamps that cleaved to our backs.
Carmen. Prayer on the breath.
Amid potted ferns, she works
a jigsaw puzzle. Bizet on the radio.
Unable to sleep, she made me lie next to her.
My brothers clambered the banyan trees.
My legs twitched, a broken clock.
Her kisses are guava and rust. She sings
kundimans her mother sang.
Sampaguita. Dahil Sa Iyo. Saan Ka Man.
Sunday morning. Puzzle pieces
strewn on yesterday’s news. Maria Callas
on the phonograph. Carmen.
Citrine fire. When she plays
the piano, the lovebirds fall silent.
Alabaster eggs tremble in glass bowls.
Afternoons, she woke with an urge
to bite the brown loaf of my arm.
The marks on my flesh faded by sundown.
The sweetest meat—
she insists. Peels a mango.
Amber rivers tracing her elbows.
A trail of L’air du Temps wafts
in her wake. I follow it to her room,
dab the scent on my wrists and throat.
Evenings, she sang kundimans.
Hatinggabi. Nasaan Ka Irog? Carmen.
Song of the mangosteen moon.
Before you go, I want to give you something. She hands me a thimble painted with a map
of Cuba. We’ve never been to Cuba.
In the dream, a sister pours rosary beads
into her cupped hands. Upon waking,
a dead wasp curled in her palm.