https://www.underbellymag.com/blog daily 0.75 2019-07-14 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/7/14/jamaal-may-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-07-14 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/5/16/bernard-cooper-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-07-14 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/5/9/natasha-saj-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-05-09 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/2/14/eloisa-amezcua-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-05-02 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/2/14/mary-oliver-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-04-18 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/2/14/tracy-k-smith-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-04-04 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/2/14/dorianne-laux-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-03-28 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/1/9/richard-siken-on-revision-1 monthly 0.5 2019-03-09 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/3/2/ross-gay-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-03-03 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/1/12/jorie-graham-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-02-16 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/2/14/kwame-dawes-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-03-14 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/1/12/tony-hoagland-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-02-09 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/1/12/mark-strand-on-revisions monthly 0.5 2019-02-02 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2019/1/9/richard-siken-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-29 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/22/sharon-olds-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-26 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/20/w-s-merwin-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-22 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/20/jericho-brown-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-19 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/20/allen-ginsberg-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/22/denise-levertov-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/22/donald-hall-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2017/10/15/sharonolds monthly 0.5 2019-01-04 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/22/amiri-baraka-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/22/li-young-lee-on-revision monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/10/28/cameron-awkward-rich monthly 0.5 2019-01-15 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/12/11/ching-in-chen-on-revision monthly 0.5 2018-12-20 https://www.underbellymag.com/blog/2018/10/28/terrance-hayes-on-revision monthly 0.5 2018-12-13 https://www.underbellymag.com/archive-13-index daily 0.75 2022-10-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6cc9d1c3-5ad4-4a8b-ab0a-bf5834cdbc4d/Rules+for+the+c+joint.jpg Issue 13 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/3d07f52d-0cb6-4bf5-9812-c86599ca25ac/pre-writing+protocol.jpg Issue 13 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/60df8a49-01df-48af-90f7-682bf6197969/makalani-bandele-PHOTO-CREDIT-Andre-Howard-scaled-e1585338494769.jpg Issue 13 - makalani bandele Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6553c96b-29fa-4240-9b32-d14d91b2f57d/59628842_10214736861158590_8761513776651436032_n.jpg Issue 13 - Noor Hindi Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d87d7a82-94fc-4519-a6ea-c0b024e0e1c5/Elana-+Hallie+Easley-23.jpg Issue 13 - Elana Bell Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9ecc2884-f4d4-4d3f-a58a-9501f244721e/VI+KHI+NAO+copy+3.jpg Issue 13 - Vi Khi Nao Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/73750b4c-2b3d-4a19-83c3-5a8d36cd998a/cc98cb74c1012ffa44ec62ce68fcf05c80879498.jpg Issue 13 - L. Lamar Wilson Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-14-index daily 0.75 2023-02-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/2b586a42-5582-4a64-bf73-86edc1d3f0b6/HeadShot+White.jpg Issue 14 Archive - Ajanae Dawkins Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/704ace0e-e541-49a3-b79d-bf5d856d208f/johnson_photo1.jpg Issue 14 Archive - Jenny Johnson Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/e72a3af8-d9e3-4823-b9b9-3f1225e2ff06/Screen+Shot+2022-10-19+at+3.29.30+PM.png Issue 14 Archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/e95f0fe9-4d92-46b6-8d41-ed5b1b4b871b/Queeney_AP_22.jpg Issue 14 Archive - Maggie Queeney Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/55b257df-818b-4793-b014-6c6cf85c58c5/Anth_RoomTh8897.jpg Issue 14 Archive - Brittany Rogers Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/66394ca7-4a97-4c1c-af90-363f41c68c63/Screen+Shot+2022-10-19+at+3.09.27+PM.png Issue 14 Archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/200c2a58-4585-449a-b677-8298f3341b4e/Screen+Shot+2022-10-19+at+3.09.13+PM.png Issue 14 Archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/ebbc9047-de17-4a59-b946-071e586d904a/Kay-Ulanday-Barrett-3.jpg Issue 14 Archive - Kay Ulanday Barrett Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d79a2263-ae99-4ecb-8ddc-7b8d51f6f023/Screen+Shot+2022-10-19+at+3.40.14+PM.png Issue 14 Archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/87ff9ed0-6704-40ce-9d05-1181f4fc3ebc/Screen+Shot+2022-10-19+at+3.38.21+PM.png Issue 14 Archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-15-archive daily 0.75 2023-05-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/c1d163f4-0dd1-41db-ba57-7e62ffdb1909/Author+Photo+-+Cortney+Lamar+Charleston.jpg Issue 15 archive - Cortney Lamar Charleston Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d53860f5-5dbc-4b5f-9443-501a14da60f1/Screen+Shot+2023-02-26+at+9.16.36+AM.png Issue 15 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/131f2f53-ecee-4a81-b134-f507dcf3f4a4/Screen+Shot+2023-05-20+at+1.20.28+PM.png Issue 15 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/58e081c0-3ad9-4a4f-9e7c-f952db2b4121/full+photo+by+Robin-Martin+%282%29.JPG Issue 15 archive - Cynthia Manick Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/5297649d-1ee4-4630-908d-7e80235960cf/Screen+Shot+2023-02-26+at+9.30.47+AM.png Issue 15 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/3db6c9af-befb-40e2-8111-6b140ce4d6a0/March2022.jpg Issue 15 archive - Ruben Quesada Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/8dc3c53f-e005-4396-9482-3559054171ab/greathouse_headshot22_gs.jpg Issue 15 archive - torrin a. greathouse Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/25655a3f-2f42-4617-9c84-943f5ea2bbd9/DSC_4406-2.jpg Issue 15 archive - Stevie Edwards Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/0a84cee2-0f4c-45c7-834a-4f77148b0c3f/Screen+Shot+2023-02-26+at+9.25.11+AM.png Issue 15 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-16-archive daily 0.75 2024-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6094a230-8468-4c38-b717-9a590d288ba6/Sarah+Audsley_B%26W_Credit+Carolyn+Kehler.jpg Issue 16 archive - Sarah Audsley Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/cc9ec0e3-6871-4ddc-b80a-6392904dc8ab/Codjoe1.jpg Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/7a733852-a2e6-4835-8b86-4f4b812ef6f0/Codjoe.headshot.medium.jpg Issue 16 archive - Ama Codjoe Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/23a47e45-6786-4387-8218-3bccbf9a2e85/Codjoe2.jpg Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/dfe5f19c-43f9-4a78-bd3b-586dfd5f956a/Kemi+Alabi+in+Clouds%2C+portrait+by+Toya+Beacham.jpg Issue 16 archive - Kemi Alabi Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1c925589-7755-4ac8-bb0b-5194dd2761cd/Kemi+Alabi+for+unberbelly+-+Against+Heaven+first+draft%2C+two+pages.jpg Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d148cc68-10f8-4ee4-bffb-1b832c4b93bd/Screen+Shot+2023-05-20+at+1.43.12+PM.png Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/f169b219-5168-47b7-8b26-98787d0d07a5/Kemi+Alabi+for+unberbelly+-+Against+Heaven+first+draft%2C+page+1.jpg Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/23c06cfb-cffa-4a9a-aa44-94c7e7e2ea8e/Kemi+Alabi+for+unberbelly+-+Against+Heaven+first+draft%2C+page+2.jpg Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/38d2581d-c285-407e-af82-c52342a86d41/IMG_0235.jpg Issue 16 archive - CM Burroughs Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/96c0002e-2e8d-4be1-bf08-6fbb72710380/Screen+Shot+2023-05-20+at+1.02.29+PM.png Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/cf7a3e15-b39d-4ead-8989-553db88e300a/Screen+Shot+2023-05-20+at+2.05.11+PM.png Issue 16 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/50f31452-6212-4249-b5b4-163317456add/Jackson+photo+B%26W+large+by+Ben+Chrisman.jpg Issue 16 archive - Gary Jackson Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-17-archive daily 0.75 2024-05-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9a10f80b-5232-43b2-8f67-d826308f9bc1/Margaret+Rhee+Headshot.jpg issue 17 archive - Margaret Rhee Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/2802bef9-1e34-40c3-ac63-67454e20b920/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.52.37+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/af92cab7-11d9-4207-bbed-5012355c041e/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.43.24+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/c6254eea-4f7e-4e43-aa63-1381b868e050/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.42.19+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/a81aa1f8-99e0-4bcd-b921-247038383277/brian-teare-ryan+collerd+copy.jpeg issue 17 archive - Brian Teare Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/f95e55b0-ce25-4f65-bf8b-2185eb171f7e/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.26.12+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1c478819-cc46-4cd8-a597-69beec991fc7/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.17.13+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/8d8dba28-abd0-426c-a878-30d33018a9ea/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.20.16+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d9fa191a-2d64-4f49-9206-60040b02c42b/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.17.46+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d759e6bc-6d7f-4ae9-9ca1-ed9407b13fb3/Anastacia-Renee_byJRycheal+%281%29.jpg issue 17 archive - Anastacia-Renee Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9cc9f6c0-3c16-493d-93a3-60ea4c6d85dc/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.15.49+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/bb5c2435-eae1-4292-91a3-91231c6e1755/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.16.35+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/f5af509e-2f65-465a-93d6-c8b432db4636/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+6.19.10+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/10531db3-496f-4956-8ccc-62eb00d6474d/eloisaamezcua_credit+amelia+golden.jpeg issue 17 archive - Eloisa Amezcua Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/00682204-8005-4162-b559-cf92d1a72446/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+5.52.32+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/17e7bc4e-af0c-4828-8b44-f6e291b4ff88/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+5.56.59+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/a0a39d1f-9d86-40ad-b13e-a44fdf30e550/Screen+Shot+2024-01-13+at+5.57.23+PM.png issue 17 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/969e5436-3229-4d00-a5b3-f98ac084f557/Courtney+Faye+Taylor1+copy+2.jpg issue 17 archive - Courtney Faye Taylor Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-18-archive daily 0.75 2024-12-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d424a7af-dcc3-4ba5-90e0-dc21d0fddac5/My+Life+page+2+%28later+draft%29.jpg Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/b1c95f5d-dfe6-4353-8799-446f0620e409/Rae+Armantrout+by+Andrea+Auge+1.JPG Issue 18 archive - Rae Armantrout Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/af0a9376-a0fd-45a8-bf5c-3fd2ac16c555/My+Life+page+1.jpg Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6faf1369-2db6-436e-bdf5-5144109895e7/Screen+Shot+2024-05-21+at+8.00.34+PM.png Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/fb59d081-659a-44b7-b511-4887c8ed88db/James_headshot.jpg Issue 18 archive - Omotara James Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/351cc969-fd3a-41b1-ac21-a5b56b900ed4/Screen+Shot+2024-05-21+at+8.00.53+PM.png Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/3c43313c-d53c-48ec-b719-5da553f23c5c/Screen+Shot+2024-05-19+at+3.54.53+PM.png Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6f318d43-38a4-40cc-a97d-9e0ea7d8dc3c/Screen+Shot+2024-05-19+at+3.55.05+PM.png Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/45a0df3c-e7f5-4194-b3ec-e8ef8143f9a8/Pollock.Official_Mville+%282%29+BW+%281%29.jpg Issue 18 archive - Iain Haley Pollock Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/d660772c-fee5-4b3e-928d-417430420c2a/Screen+Shot+2024-05-19+at+3.54.38+PM.png Issue 18 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/b5577622-c012-41a8-8d5d-6d0b2e782cc4/Eugenia+Leigh+_+BW+_+Underbelly.jpg Issue 18 archive - Eugenia Leigh Text here re: the revision process https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-19-archive daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/0a70bf9b-c979-4c42-b856-fe1024f7b6e4/Main+headshot+b_w.jpeg Issue 19 archive - Ariana Benson Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/a256e3e4-0b31-40f6-92e5-a43ddbceb7f5/underbelly+draft+images+benson.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/95d40dc6-7937-4890-945e-0081f19bd3c4/image0+%284%29.jpg Issue 19 archive - Yesenia Montilla Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/bd164223-a12d-47a8-b50b-768aa815dbc4/SapigaoJanice_Photo_bw.jpg Issue 19 archive - Janice Lobo Sapigao Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1a8bdbd8-be3e-4e1c-8629-f75e49f7968d/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.19.18+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/76315d27-9437-43ca-81b8-7477033a843d/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.22.04+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/079af3aa-342b-43a4-910c-f312ff79b012/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.18.43+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/fa4a5b32-67cc-4f61-b355-00a6621b31af/IMG_2089-5+%281%29.jpg Issue 19 archive - Karisma Price Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/787bf54f-703c-48a0-94a7-500e128b2fd3/SeemaReza-TinaLeuFotos-2024-21.jpg Issue 19 archive - Seema Reza Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/643641fe-5c78-4bc9-93b6-46e611282f2a/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.37.14+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6c532553-f5c4-48f2-b607-64f7771f1b6d/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.41.05+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/274ca66c-4307-4c67-8be7-79b4d57407bc/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.38.21+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6723215a-f891-4cf4-bf3e-a7ee33c20f0b/Screen+Shot+2024-12-08+at+6.40.17+PM.png Issue 19 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/home daily 1.0 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1742771191440-HZGYIY60MJ6U6G4PNUQM/2.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1742771188609-483GSIBS14FNHUU27HFE/3.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1742771196242-YHYBTYRKWJ0BH5A4PUJC/4.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1742771201732-X06VVQDVA6FH8J9LR08F/5.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1742771207080-T9ZDCTHGG9O8FZG2GD7H/6.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1516571737203-RZREJ62EITBDNFNJUUA6/line.png Home https://www.underbellymag.com/about daily 0.75 2018-02-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518989609728-ZGA2MYKO090IG32B8DT8/armbw.jpg About revision https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518989794328-V7EJ25W5HUN7RREE9Q70/Maya_015+%281%29.jpg About revision https://www.underbellymag.com/features daily 0.75 2019-02-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527308334596-4M2X45MHRPRDHUZITGMS/Clue+Draft+%28not+done+despite+note%29.JPG issue 2 archive "clue" draft -- not done, despite note https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527306590239-D6P08A0WF8LUCS0SWNXD/Cameron_AwkwardRich.JPG issue 2 archive - Cameron Awkward-Rich In doing research for my dissertation, I spent some time wandering around in digitized newspaper archives, looking for traces of lives we might now call trans. Many of these traces didn’t add up to a full story, or fell outside the frame of my argument; in any case, I have a haphazard collection of articles about people who were caught—by the law, by post-mortem exam—living as “the other sex” that I could not make use of in a more disciplined, scholarly way. Thankfully, as a poet, I am more interested in and able to explore the kinds of questions and speculations that such an archive prompts than I am in getting at the facts of the matter. For example: What are the ethics of making use of material that only exists because a violence occurred? What are the resonances between past and present, what are they made of? How can I speak with the dead? One of the traces of a life I haven’t been able to let go of, or adequately follow up on, is this story about a black person named Lawrence Jackson who was arrested in late 19th century Chicago for wearing a dress. It’s a strange account, even stranger than many similar stories, because apparently Jackson offered to self-exile from Chicago, in lieu of having money to pay the fine. Even though Jackson’s solution made sense within the logic of anti-crossdressing laws, which were all about removing “problem bodies” from public space, the judge threw them in jail anyway, because he felt “a little punishment would be beneficial.” I wrote this poem because I couldn’t get this story out of my head. Most of my poems begin in my notebook, so this is actually probably the second draft, the text from my notebook but with a shape. In revising, I first took out much clunky/unnecessary language. But most of the work of revising was deciding how many of the details of the story needed to be in the poem, the right balance of transparency for the reader and intimacy with Jackson. I took out what was the third line (“the papers called you…”) because it seemed to abruptly interrupt that intimacy – Jackson, probably, already knows what they were called. Same thing with what were the first three lines of the last section. I think those lines were just my way of getting myself back to my present and “I draw a frame around the frame” already does that. But, also, this boring meta-commentary about how I feel about finding the Jackson story interrupts the intimacy (and, if the poem is working, shouldn’t be necessary). I suppose I re-shuffled the sections because I wanted to emphasize the parallel between the first and second sections, between the representation of Jackson and the representation of me, and to introduce the idea of the potentials that lie just outside of any frame earlier. Also, it felt important that the poem be in all couplets—again about doubling between me and Jackson, past and present—except for that one line which is just a list of mechanisms by which a gender nonconforming person can find themselves trapped. I got rid of that bit at the end about birds, because I don’t know what it was doing there… I guess I was trying to explain how the body could be “not a question,” but it becomes a question again in that attempt at justification. So, no birds. Finally, the word “room” in the first line became “frame” after I inserted this poem into my manuscript, because “room” in that book takes on an overdetermined meaning that doesn’t make sense in the world of this poem. Oh! And “//” became “…” I don’t know why! (The poem was originally published in Indiana Review, though this final version is slightly different than that version.) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527307765964-KCKRIM486IR22AH828LY/Sealey%2C+N.+Photo+by+Rachel+Eliza+Griffiths.jpg issue 2 archive - Nicole Sealey This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1539980639329-9VNUHYQ0GIKUSWZCDJUQ/IMG_1020.jpg issue 2 archive - Jericho Brown I think revision is all about knowing when you’re talking and knowing when you’re singing…and understanding you’re not done with your poem until all of it sings. I usually get rid of the ideas I already knew and keep the ideas writing the first draft allows me to discover. It’s a good idea to delete any point you find yourself making. I’ve gotten more positive feedback on this poem than I have on any other. That’s probably a reason not to show you that it didn’t spring from my head fully formed. But only our honesty is what progresses poetry. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527304647193-09Z17W8TZMVDUJMREQRK/C+Bain+BW.jpg issue 2 archive - C. Bain Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527304757865-31NCCRPLX3V05TSBLGPL/EDITDestiny+Birdsong+HUNTER+ARMISTEAD.jpg issue 2 archive - Destiny O. Birdsong Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527308276936-WZYRWC8JFRV5QWUEYUMU/Initial+Notes+for+Clue.JPG issue 2 archive Initial notes for "clue" https://www.underbellymag.com/contributors daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://www.underbellymag.com/archive-issue-1 daily 0.75 2018-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1516650591401-HL3IY2GQVTNNSGY52Z7A/Bio+Photo.jpeg issue 1 archive - Hanif Abdurraqib This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518286844704-DKNRJXIY0N426VLQZMBI/heritage+edits.png issue 1 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518284456398-V6GBKKTVBY8OEZTCD4GO/Hanif+poem+final+version.png issue 1 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1516650457281-5EBOUJBMZ7JAJLD248D7/authorphoto.jpeg issue 1 archive - Emily Jungmin Yoon Text here re: the revision process         https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518284711313-J6EA1UG53IK0RXVIYJAG/IMG_2788.JPG issue 1 archive - Kaveh Akbar Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old Iranian woman, was hanged on October 25th, 2014, for killing a man who was attempting to rape her. I “wrote” the first draft of this poem just days after reading a news story about Jabbari’s execution. In a fugue of grief and confusion and hopeless impotent anger I found a final message she'd given to her mother. It was and is one of the most devastating texts I’d ever read. It ruined me completely. I knew I wanted to speak to her story in some capacity, but I didn’t know how. I thought maybe the secret was in using Jabbari’s own words. I worked all day on an erasure of that final letter, creating the poem “LONG POLISHED NAILS.” Exhausted, I looked at what I had at the end of the day and felt an indescribable but overwhelming offness. I wasn’t sure what it was—at the craft level, I was more or less satisfied with the poem—but something at its core was fundamentally and essentially incorrect. I realize now I was reacting to the wrongness of the whole impulse—why was I erasing the language of a woman who had already been violently erased? Why was I stealing her last earthly possession, her language, from her? I set the poem aside to move fully forward into my grieving. Over a year later, I still hadn’t revisited that erasure, though I thought often about Jabbari’s horrible story. One morning going through my standard morning writing routine, I noticed a few familiar phrases creeping into what I was writing. I thought maybe I was remembering something I’d read recently, but I couldn’t place the phrases. Google was no help. I searched through my old drafts and realized I was unconsciously pulling language from my “LONG POLISHED NAILS” erasure. That morning, my brain was finally ready to write a poem for Jabbari. “HERITAGE” came out basically in its current form within the next couple hours. It’s still an excruciating poem for me to even look at, and I’ve only read it in front of an audience once, to a very particular group. But I wanted to write this to speak about the whole process, how careless I was in my early wrongheaded attempts at erasure, and how time and faith in the process of grieving saw me through to a small measure of closure. A poem for Reyhaneh. (originally published in Ninth Letter) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1516650408103-UX4WBMJSW2036PBY4Y7K/IMG_1397+3.JPG issue 1 archive - Irène Mathieu Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527301554864-R8JS94GOR6AJVNU6EMJJ/McKibbens+Author+Photo+CCP.jpg issue 1 archive - Rachel McKibbens This poem appears in my most recent full-length book of poems, blud. Of all the poems within the book, this was the one I worked longest on. I’ve probably written this poem six times, published, and moved on, but this one in particular fought me the entire way. As an un-mothered woman, I will always be hungry to discover when motherhood actually happens. I imagine a newborn, newly unhitched from the womb, must earn its relationship with its mother, and vice versa. It took a little more than a year to figure out that the wonder of my children’s curiosity wasn’t the crushing thing I thought it was -- instead, the sorrow was in the speaker understanding maternal nurturing was simply never in the cards for her. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1518284399502-B07H9FY0XU1FCY2QTFNT/AN+ORDINARY+MISFORTUNE.png issue 1 archive https://www.underbellymag.com/new-page daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1527302054315-EYK08GGX0X81MDXQIM7A/underbelly+logo.png x https://www.underbellymag.com/archiveissue11 daily 0.75 2021-12-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/24608655-b728-4a3c-bd35-5898e0a060a2/lizpic.jpg Issue 11 archive - Liz Countryman In a poem about memory, I am seeking something new, unplanned, possible. The collection that includes this poem started coming into being around the time I became a mother. I was experiencing, each day, how in moments of frightening, fundamental change I felt somehow in the presence of stuff from long ago, experiences I thought were lost—faced with them, now—and in this proximity to the past there was potential, like when you first meet someone you love but have not yet spoken a word. My mother is Australian. My father is American. I grew up in New Jersey, visiting Australia once every four years or so. Green Island (Dabuukji) is offshore from Cairns, and my family went there as tourists for the day in 1984, when I was five, to see the Great Barrier Reef. This poem recalls that day trip. In 2016, I was thinking a lot about coral bleaching and the irreparable harm climate change is causing to the reef. With that wave of contemporary dread and those bright, blurry memories of visiting my mother’s home when I was little knocking against each other in my head, I wrote this first draft. When I was first working on this poem, I found it difficult to pinpoint what made it seem unsatisfactory to me. I now recognize that there’s a kind of loose anonymity to the perspective in the early draft that leaves the poem a little cold. The speaker refers to “child,” “man,” “figure,” “body,” “anyone,” “dear one,” etc., without making those relationships specific or knowable. The tone is dreamlike and mournful, but since the poem conceals its own stakes, the reader can’t join in the mourning. To me, the poem just seemed stuck in its mood, perhaps in need of some entirely different narrative element to counterbalance the dream of memory. I rewrote the poem and gave up on it many times. Since the first draft of the poem felt detached from the remembered experience, I revised by letting my personal attachment become more visible. The final version is more specific about physical perspective, even as it calls into question the relative position of the figures in that remembered scene. It also explores the particularity of how I carried those memories along with me months and years after. Would I have remembered that day trip, wondered about it so often, had it not been for the t shirt my father bought there? That magical, distant place became a fixture in my imagination, perhaps, by way of this familiar place—my dad’s lap, the fuzzy lettering on his shirt close to my face as I was just learning to read. The star in the final line arrived unexpectedly—a new event in the poem, not exactly something remembered. But it still seems true to me. As a child, I couldn’t think about my family without imaging this vast geographical space. Looking at that burning, distant thing—there’s a feeling of imminence, but also of miraculous proximity to the past. * “Green Island” was originally published in The Canary. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/c0fabc08-e098-43f2-bb1b-9974005de9fd/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-08-08%2Bat%2B7.44.08%2BPM.png Issue 11 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/de75d4ab-2a5b-48da-aa95-ee3fa4f54d44/wainscott-headshot-cropped.jpg Issue 11 archive - Sara Wainscott The early version of this poem came from taking a walk to mail a letter, walking and thinking, which maybe for most other people also involves mental gyrations between the to-do of the present and fractured flashes of memory and imaginings. On this walk, I had a fleeting moment of déjà vu, which is where this draft starts and stalls. What fails in this draft—flailing around in time, resisting the story, and filling the moment to excess—are part of what compels my ideas about poetry. I’m fascinated by the mind-junk* responsible for these moments, the commonplace and inconsequential perceptions of daily life that accumulate into a self so personal it’s practically beneath notice, the mind-junk buzzing collectively inside human experience, mostly ignored but happening most of the time. This poem, as with all my recent poems, is shaped by a sense of simultaneity and seeking this synchronicity directs my revision process. In reworking this poem, I wanted to double down on the things that failed initially. I attempted to explode the logic of my own story by imagining this moment within a collective hyper-compressed time blip, a portal to/through a shared experience. To that end, double-spacing the lines isolates each one to the brink of monostich, yet the syntax both suggests and blurs associations. The revision is necessarily without punctuation since punctuation interferes with this overlap. The resulting poem tries to simulcast otherwise unrelated bits of mind-junk as a subversive performance of timespace, though I know the constraints inherent to language complicate this objective. I’m okay with that. Talking about the portal opens the portal. * trivia, memory, time, pop culture, reportage, tall tales, song lyrics, personal observation, public knowledge, signage, weather, dreams… https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/281e1228-9091-45f8-b0d6-8fffa10510d9/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-08-08%2Bat%2B7.39.02%2BPM.png Issue 11 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6b2b87c1-9671-4788-bcd2-1d8c0bc78c0c/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-08-08%2Bat%2B7.44.21%2BPM.png Issue 11 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/08841345-ae1e-4bee-ad23-5d7c5f7b3942/Nate+Marshall+Photo.jpg Issue 11 archive - Nate Marshall Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/0260eed0-e7fd-4806-97c9-a9004f3410ac/joseolivarez-1-32.jpg Issue 11 archive - José Olivarez i started writing this poem while walking to my local coffee shop. it was still cold, but the days were getting longer. it was sunny, so i turned my head up to the sky to receive as much sunlight as i could. that’s how i noticed that all the trees along my walk were blooming. the color was scarlet, so velvety i could almost feel it. i can’t explain to you why i immediately thought of my Mamá Jacinta. another origin story for this poem is the song “Volver Volver” by Vicente Fernandez. during the spring, i got really into listening to a playlist called “Mexican Party Anthems” on Spotify. why? well, i hadn’t seen my family in over a year. my parents got sick during that time and there were some days i worried my parents were going to die, and i was going to be 800 miles away receiving the news through telephone. there’s a line in the song where Vicente sings, “yo sé perder, yo sé perder” and the way he sings it i believe it. i was trying to write a poem with that energy. you’ll notice that there aren’t a ton of revisions. i don’t know. the most important thing i pay attention to when i’m revising can’t be fully explained. it’s a feeling. does the poem charge me with energy? might it charge others? a big part of my revision process used to be showing up to open mics and reading new work. that’s harder now, but i look forward to when i can read poems for people live again. performing helps me hear the music of the poem in a way that is tough to simulate at my desk. i cut a line because my friend Nicole suggested it to me, and as soon as she mentioned it, i could recognize the clunkiness of the line. she didn’t call the line clunky, but when i reread the poem to myself, i could hear it. i changed the word “won” to the word “taken” in the last line at the suggestion of my friend, Eloisa. i added stanza breaks to give the lines room to breathe and slow the poem down a bit. i don’t know. i might cut the stanza breaks the next time you see this poem. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/4cc816fb-5376-4e8a-904c-646fe5289842/headshot.jpg Issue 11 archive - Helene Achanzar This poem began in a notebook in 2008. I was living on the top floor of a Victorian mansion in Iowa City, and each morning I’d see a man bike down my street. Though I didn’t know his name and had never spoken a word to him, out of loneliness or boredom, I convinced myself I was in love. After weeks of watching him from my window, I found him drinking coffee alone at a cafe. I sat a few tables away and scribbled some lines. I never mustered up the courage to say hello. Probably for the best. I’ve never written a poem from beginning to end. All of my poems come from pages of handwritten phrases or voice memos that are puzzled together, which means lines from a single poem may have first been composed weeks or months apart. Revision means moving lines around with the goal of coherence. My first impulse is always to write poems in couplets. I think about units of meaning in poetry - the stanza, the line, the phrase, the word - and I find that couplets are not only a complex and crystalline way to make meaning, but they're also what come most naturally to me in drafts. Sometimes I force myself to break a poem out of couplets, but it's an intentional and often unsuccessful process. Because I usually gather too few lines for a poem to cohere, revision also means filling in blanks. For “ICD-10 F94.0: Selective Mutism,” there were a lot of blanks to fill. Over a decade after writing this poem, I’m still startled by its gestures toward violence, how distant its themes are from its innocuous origin. Equally surprising is the way the poem’s content demanded a form in which some of the blanks refused to be filled. * “ICD-10 F94.0: Selective Mutism” was originally published in Jubilat. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue7arch daily 0.75 2020-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1592968940190-7UXXEKOCJMGR1SGXXC3G/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-12-08%2Bat%2B2.39.59%2BPM.png Issue 7 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1592967548391-WW5LLXCNP5ZE2VQBQ918/Screen+Shot+2020-06-23+at+9.53.33+PM.png Issue 7 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1593373393627-F78HM8X484ENV7V4CBUQ/Photo%252Bby%252BAndrew%252BKilgore.jpg Issue 7 archive - 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 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1592969589638-0B97NL6Q4FZ60W68XFSW/Angela-Torres-author%2Bphoto.jpg Issue 7 archive - 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1593373433554-XWPRAMSCXSGBYRH37SC5/Kuipers-full-res-headshot-bw.jpg Issue 7 archive - 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1592968036217-H70BGQGL9IQ8DIKIEQ1G/Taneum%2BBambrick.jpg Issue 7 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1592967419567-TWHM6M5EN6PO07H0GZ1J/abani+5.jpg.jpeg Issue 7 archive - Chris Abani Text here re: the revision process https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-3-archive daily 0.75 2019-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547513389229-JH27MYQD17S91XZB795X/Frustration+Off+My+Chest.jpg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547513779479-QJE7A4X15VUXAOQZDBOB/JWbw.jpg issue 3 archive - Jane Wong My poems always start from notes. I went on a kind of a scavenger hunt through notebooks. What I found from my notebooks: "someone in the apartment next door thrashes their furniture," an image of ants, "the dripping sink, the neighbor's feet above me," and then this thing I wrote: "Dear American Dream, eat roses, eat rats, eat a piece of garbage. Eat a rusted car tire." All of these ideas swirled into my head as I wrote. I remember this poem being a heartbreak poem. And how everyone around me kept saying: "Well, at least there's something to learn from every heartbreak." I remember thinking: what is there to learn? Should I learn to be more pleasant, more polite? Less "intense"? And I ended with this poem here --- which strangely goes back in time and asks: what can I learn from the wisdom of my younger self? What can I learn from my family's experience with heartbreak (my parents' arranged marriage, the American Dream)? The answer, by the end, seems to be clear: I must remain myself. Do not lessen, do not be swayed by false promises. Also, in revision, I've started recording myself and revising after listening to the play-back. Something about hearing my voice/the breath helps. You can see that via the stanza breaks. * The poem originally appeared in The Adroit Journal. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547513551845-WPZC38VPB30REIOO4FI0/Frustration%2BOff%2BMy%2BChest%2Bcopy.jpg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525816195-8IN4XIX3BC72TI02XKHP/KW+bw.jpg issue 3 archive - Keith S. Wilson This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547512945894-8H0KZCSFJNX62J6YD5ER/Tim+Seibles--Turn+it+Up+Draft_IMG_0937.JPG issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525426747-L96EEMBAFO2BNBI56YM4/image1.jpeg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525426487-HM8UWPFKWOZC2SWQBXZL/image2.jpeg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525430474-VUZJ0X7D71WLI24G1RW3/image3.jpeg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525429534-IHE7AST02HINKLOXYM63/image4.jpeg issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525903512-9TKOX3FHFVO8MMQOHG8X/Draft+1.png issue 3 archive Initial notes for "clue" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547512704453-5TWSZ59E4YZTABFHHV2M/Tim+Seibles--Headshot+by+Jennifer+Fish_+4Z1B6714.jpg issue 3 archive - Tim Seibles Initially, each of these poems began with an opening line that seemed to come from out of nowhere. From that point, I began to write what seemed to come next -- whatever felt organic to that first utterance. As always, my revision process involves slow but steady editing and adding to the poem's body. Clarity is the thing I'm after; I tell my students all the time "it doesn't matter how brilliant an idea is if it can't be understood." So, after the first rush of words, I try to figure out what the essential news of the poem is. Then, the process becomes one of searching for fresh language and clearing away all that is merely muttering and stuttering. Ideally, one is left with something readable and memorable. * Photo credit: Jennifer Fish https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547513085176-4021A2N1JKAFUT3S7WMY/Tim+Seibles--And+Yet+draft_IMG_0938.JPG issue 3 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547525923785-KSANJ0NLUDEG17L3YEYD/Draft+2.jpg issue 3 archive "clue" draft -- not done, despite note https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547524908419-W4KOBA38WWYHRKAOFME4/JJoseph_Author+Photo+BW.jpg issue 3 archive - Janine Joseph Sometimes, the more I want a poem to proceed, the more the process begins to feel like an interrogation or immigration interview. I respond by pivoting on the page and writing myself into a corner or through an easy exit. I know when I’ve done this because the poem will suddenly claim to have nothing more to say, though the document will remain open on my computer and I will mull lines aloud while I go about my day. When I draft, I have to be cognizant of this impulse to turn away or show myself out and how it tricks me into thinking the work of the poem is done. I move away the lines or sentences that lead me into insincerity as they appear and approach the material again. My drafts are full of pages of these bob-and-weaves, misfires, false starts, diversions, and dead ends. Honing requires patience on my part—and this poem in particular had to trust me. * This poem first appeared in Connotation Press (John Hoppenthaler’s “Poetry Congeries”) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1547513324435-YQ7QE8G2LB9TRGEE4Q20/Jacob+Saenz+Author+Pic.jpg issue 3 archive - Jacob Saenz Text here re: the revision process https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-4-archive daily 0.75 2019-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553280098446-NCG16AE72MHH7FQ279U4/ACRbw.jpg issue 4 archive - Alison C. Rollins The first draft of the poem “Water Lilies” was written in April 2018 after moving the month before to Chicago. It was created as part of the “Poem-A-Day Challenge” which many writers participate in as a celebration of National Poetry Month. When tasked with writing a new poem every day for thirty days the initial hurdle of just getting something on the page can be reduced by not feeling like you completely have to reinvent the wheel. I often find when trying to generate new work it can be helpful to use an existing poem as a springboard or as an architectural blueprint for writing a new piece of my own. To write “Water Lilies” I utilized Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Venus’-flytraps” from his collection Magic City. Similarly to Komunyakaa, I wanted to use the name of a flower to title the work and to influence as well as complicate the narrative of the poem itself. If writing a poem is similar to cooking a culinary dish, I would say that my go-to seasoning or flavor profile is surrealism. I greatly enjoy the absurd. On the other hand, I realize that I can be heavy-handed with surreal language as a default safety mechanism to consciously and/or unconsciously avoid certain truths and traumas. Often I will move away from narrative or detailing particulars that have the potential to raise my own vulnerability. As a consequence, the poem can sometimes suffer from becoming frustratingly obscure for the reader. One of my favorite texts that speaks to this dynamic is Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Within it, Cixous argues, “Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death.” Furthermore Cixous suggests, “We have to lie to live. . . we must try to un-lie.” If each poem sits on a continuum of truth, I would say my later draft of “Water Lilies” has moved closer to expressing a greater transparency and honesty. I worked through the later draft of this poem in August of 2018 in Vermont at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In the later draft I think I achieved greater concision with the imagery, and the reader is better situated to wade through the poem. I would also say that the later draft required a greater honesty and vulnerability of me despite its use of fewer words and less space on the page. With this particular poem I have needed breathing room to grapple with my own personal failures, childlessness, my divorce, the messiness of my sexuality and desire, inherited trauma, and the violence of being in the world as a black woman. I tried to push for greater brevity in this draft and to tell a story as economically as possible. I also tried to shift between the past and present tense as seamlessly as possible. An example of shifting in time and space that I strive for would be Terrance Hayes’s “At Pegasus” from his collection, Muscular Music. “Water Lilies” has never been published and by no means does it feel “completed” to me. It is a poem that I have set aside to potentially revisit or use as a graveyard to extract lines from for another future work. At this point, “Water Lilies” is just as unfinished, in-process, and chaotic as my daily attempt to stay alive. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553279729478-WR3W9NED3D13R12V778Z/66th+final.png issue 4 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553280286781-TD3IATZ3HTZ2R7E24PE2/Raena+BW.jpg issue 4 archive - Raena Shirali This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553279681605-FQLUY5HL1GSNKAF94UZY/last+day+of+66+draft.png issue 4 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553279140338-EMBECZ0BN7D6U73WW0GW/f_Ada+Limon_v1.jpg issue 4 archive - Ada Limón The first version of the poem is almost there. But you can see that I am still focusing on the facts of the poem. The poem is based on a true story. My mother was a caretaker for a 40-acre horse ranch in Sonoma, California where she primarily cared for retired police horses. All of her stories of the horses were amazing. Their journeys. How they came to the ranch. Some young. Some old. In the first poem I am really trying to get the facts right, the narrative. In the second version, I've realized that it's not about this little kindness, it's about being released, it's about being forgiven. The horse accidentally killed a man. Still, he gets to live out his long years with his rider on a ranch in Montana. And shouldn't he? In the second and final version, I've teased out that truth for myself which strengthens the ending and really gives the whole poem a new backbone. The other part of the revision process for me, is that in the second version, and really all my revisions, I am revising for sound, for lyricism, and musicality, rhythm. The first version was published very quickly after I had written it. I probably sent it off a little too soon after someone requested poems. But the second version has an ear to it; it has a strong rhythm. The first one is so much (too much) information quickly, while the second takes its time and lets the poem do the slow work of sound and beauty as well as a narrative. I am so much happier with the final version primarily because I believe that's how the poem should be, a poem about forgiveness, not simply about loving live things, not only about kindness. But also, I am just much happier with the sound and structure of the poem. It has a tension and friction and power that the first version doesn't quite have yet. Oh, what a gift time is. A clearer eye, a more attuned ear, all of these things come so much more easily after a little time has passed. But, like the poem insists, I will forgive my past selves and be only the good horse of the now. * Photo credit: Lucas Marquardt https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553279975414-I2G0FGF1NV4BXYOZDYRG/JOLegaspi1.jpg issue 4 archive - Joseph O. Legaspi I’d been trying to write this poem for years. My father passed away December 2003. We were so far from having a semblance of a relationship that I couldn’t even call it strained. Yet, a parent’s absence is as powerful as his presence. Or his presence is his absence, forever looming darkly. On the night I received the call from my mother in suburban Los Angeles, I first lamented not the news of my father’s death, but the date with a new boy that I’d be missing due to my sudden obligatory return home. So began the reckoning. “The Kissing” was the first draft I transcribed into Word/my Mac laptop. It came after my initial heave and hurl with pen on paper, then some more scribbling, scratching and exorcism into my notebook. The year was 2015 on one of the Visayan islands of the Philippine archipelago. Unlike the motherland, I wanted the poem to be compact, wooden, claustrophobic. . . I wanted to emulate and imitate a coffin with my inert father in it; i wanted it to be buried and gone. Months later, I realized as with any death—and foremost with a blood kin’s—it never goes away. I had failed to honor this death, this poem. The title had to go, vague and romantically suggestive. (Is this a love poem?) Then the form: too obvious, benign, clustered, hence, limiting. I’d buried everything. What I needed was to infuse breath into the poem. Free it up like the soul, spirit. Permit it to contemplate the larger picture: the Lazarus-mystery of my father, Catholicism, rituals, immigrants, cycles. By breaking it up and varying its lines and stanzas, the poem travels at a better pace through space and time—the episode’s contemplative, funereal march into its momentous reckoning. By isolating the last line, the ending regained, for me, as when I first stumbled upon it, its shocking revelation. The refusal, I believe, can be read in many ways: the assertion of self, defiance of death, a turning away, but also as a headlong grasp, a critique of tradition, the optics of performance, an acceptance, a haunting, a letting go. * This poem previously appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1553279578989-CH0X3PS5WOZIBCEGGZSY/CBTBWbest.jpg issue 4 archive - Cheryl Boyce-Taylor Text here re: the revision process https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-5-archive daily 0.75 2019-08-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564975288087-0BOP0O29WUPN4WN56B3C/me%2Blong%2Byou%2Blove%2Btime_underbelly%2BDRAFT%2BVERSION.jpg Issue 5 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564975426100-CJ7TEBLZ4R2G84D2PQD3/me+long+you+love+time+FINAL+VERSION.png Issue 5 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564975599372-QQV7RIL9EF2FHDX4LIMP/TyreeBW.jpg Issue 5 archive - Tyree Daye In the first draft of “I Don’t Know What Happens to Fields” there is a big tactic lime green thread running through it trying to hit every corner of the narrative. In the final version the thread is black, thinner and in the wind. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564975511437-1FPAOYW0CBZFDC81FL93/me%252Blong%252Byou%252Blove%252Btime%252BFINAL%252BVERSION%252BP2.jpg Issue 5 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564974736809-URHR24I97SB8CSX289B7/Tara_PrinceT_BW.jpg Issue 5 archive - Tara Betts Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564975995308-SMOH2L2NZOUPFSR2CDYL/TARFIA+bw.jpg Issue 5 archive - Tarfia Faizullah This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564973807239-DY49CL9P56JUMQN5ZLHS/Jess%2BAuthor%2BPhoto.jpg Issue 5 archive - Tyehimba Jess These are the drafts that led to the final poem, Indian Combat, which appears in Olio. This is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Edmonia Lewis' sculpture of the same name. The poem started out on notebook paper, where I was trying to get the general sense of the poem. The first lines were still being forged slowly into the imagery of internal and eternal struggle that would be more fully realized in the final draft. After taking a few drafts directly from pen to paper, I transferred the poem to computer where I went through several more drafts, saving each one until I came up with the final version. This poem is now inscribed on a plaque next to the actual sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564973906825-NV0P3M3AZU9BD407UESL/Indian+Combat+T+Jess+p2.png Issue 5 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1564974911440-JF30I7MH2P2MU2UHAJWW/Chen_Ching-In_Headshot_photobyCassieMiraNicholson.jpg Issue 5 archive - Ching-In Chen I was invited by Lawndale Art Center to write an essay in response to Antonius Bui’s show, yêu em dài lâu (me love you long time). The show features Bui’s beautiful life-sized papercuts of Asian American LGBTQI* activists, including one of myself. I was honored and excited to respond in lyric essay, but when it came time to produce, I found it challenging to respond because I was bodily implicated in the show. In the first draft, I used the words in the title to generate an entry point (“me long you love time”) into a yearning to belong, to situate myself into the kind of community Bui’s work helps to dream into solid, material shape. https://www.underbellymag.com/subscribe daily 0.75 2020-07-05 https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-6-archive daily 0.75 2019-12-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575848168196-KAV263AOQG22DK7O450N/bncomp3.jpg Issue 6 archive - Kimberly Blaeser & Margaret Noodin For this poem we each approached revision a bit differently. Kim added more literal and metaphoric meaning with revisions while Margaret was often more concerned with rhythm and alliteration across languages. We entered into discussions about these elements but granted one another leeway to make changes until we both felt satisfied that the poem achieved its reach. We worked together to understand the best way forward, sometimes taking time to talk about the process before completing a revision, but, in the end, the poem felt finished when it stopped echoing across our different ways of speaking about a shared idea. When the poem subtly reenters the spiral of meaning, having advanced its arc, it seems both to close and reopen in a way that feels complete. We were working toward a single poem that did not translate language per se, but wove ideas across languages. This bilingual code-switching arose from a desire to inflect the poem with cultural understanding of an “other” that can add perspective or expertise originating out of Indigenous knowledge systems and practices (IKSP). Specifically, this poem gestures toward an awareness of our deeply intertwined realities (aka intergenerational rootedness) as a different place from which to view climate change. Using both languages and our different capacities in each, we created a stronger structure than either one of us might have created in using just one language. We are able to attend to the many intersections of the poetic sounds and meanings. Sometimes Kim saw to the metaphoric elements of the images while Margaret attended to the chains of morphemes tumbling together and echoing across our lines. Sometimes we built off of one another’s introduction of new elements into the poem. If play is a way to stretch the imagination and take great satisfaction from a team effort, then this was certainly what we did. Although it is not easy, writing together always feels like one of the best and most rewarding challenges. We surprise one another when we add a turn to the poem and it may take one or the other of us some mulling to understand that movement and its potential before we are able to reenter the process. And this is where the poem often truly takes off—when we each leave our “expected” ideas or methods and begin an untethered language journey. We definitely work differently in a solo setting because Margaret can write a poem entirely in Anishinaabemowin and change it many times before arriving at a final piece which is then translated. One of the lovely things that happens when working in two languages from the start is that the words themselves get to know one another as equals, each shaping the poem in different ways. Likewise, our collaboration is built in layers of thought, and both are explored equally as we write. Even when write alone in the present we never feel we are writing solo because there is a history each of us represents, a language honed over centuries that Margaret preserves through active use, and if done well, there may be readers in the future whose imagined presence alters the poem as we write. Like Margaret, Kim never feels entirely in charge of her writing, even when writing solo. Language, culture, spirit, or whatever muse we acknowledge (or allow) always feeds us and leads us in a direction we hadn’t anticipated. Kim often tries to intensify this element of the process by putting a poem aside and coming back to it later. Most poets can relate to being surprised by what they may have written a month ago. Kim feels as if she is “collaborating” with that already present movement or voice in the poem. In collaboration, of course, this kind of weaving of voice, ideas, direction, etc. is intense. With this particular poem, her attention in revision was partly on creating an entrance for the reader into the unfamiliar without compromising the necessary difference(s) of language and understanding. * This poem appeared in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575850933288-BFZTMF9L4MY1H6IEE8BA/IMG-8510.JPG Issue 6 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575850595191-IBPD448LM5CLBNQOQA1W/Aimee+Ross.jpg Issue 6 archive - Ross Gay & Aimee Nezhukumatathil Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Ross and I started this project in the summer of 2011 and we’d trade three to four poems a season as we tended to our respective gardens: his fruit and veggie garden in Bloomington, Indiana and my giant perennial flower garden in my former home in western NY. I (almost) always start my poems long hand. If the draft wasn’t too messy, I’d send it as a letter (via USPS) to Ross. If it was, I’d copy it out by hand (and along the way make edits/revisions in that way) and THEN type that draft out and send it to Ross. You have to understand that in addition to being one of my dearest friends, he just happens to be one of my favorite writers,and he always made me want to bring my ‘A’ game to the table. After almost a year of writing to each other, together we boarded a train bound for the Millay Colony for the Arts in the Berkshires in upstate New York. There, we met with several other writer friends (who were also working on independent projects), and revised and finished this series of epistolary poems. Our collaborative chapbook, Lace & Pyrite (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014) is how we made sense and record of a full year from our respective gardens. A little more about what we mean we say we “revised and finished this series”: Ross Gay: I absolutely ask different questions of a collaborative poem I’m revising than one created solo — because I don't know how to revise Aimee's poem, her lines or language. I might have questions, but the delight is that I'm engaging and creating with someone who, hopefully, makes poems differently than I do, and thinks about poems differently than I do, and relates to things like metaphor and simile and diction and sound and form etc. differently than I do. That's the fun of collaboration—that you very clearly enter into this thing that is bigger than you are, or is out of your control. You have to submit a bit, or join. Which I think is a lot of the fun, and the point. I definitely would revise my own lines over the course of the writing based on some of the language that Aimee was making—usually it would be some kind of music or something that I would be trying to meet. And I think a few times we would ask each other questions about what we had written, wondering about lines or words or whatever. Aimee: I never tried to revise Ross' lines—any questions or "Are you sure about this line?" moments came only after a substantial draft (several months' worth of writing back and forth) was established. I loved that Ross said he'd try to "meet" my music, as that feels similar to what I did with his lines but I'd also add that I'd sometimes change up or push against one of his lines or images, like they were magnets in a way--sometimes our magnetic fields would line up and part of the fun was figuring out when that did or didn't happen. In other words, sometimes my lines wanted to smush up against his, and other times my lines would want to go in a totally new direction, sonically and with its images. Ross: As for what I was aiming for in a collaborative poem’s final form? I don't think I was aiming for anything, beyond the thing that came. We knew we wanted to write a collaborative epistolary poem about our gardens, and that was that. So the poem—like the poem poem—showed itself to us over the course of its making. The basic form—epistolary—was there from the start. Aimee: I think there is an alphabet and language of the outdoors that helps me develop my own language in observance of human relationships that never ceases to delight and astonish me. In other words, I believe poetry about and from the natural world can make you feel like you’ve traveled, can give you a rush of understanding of less familiar landscapes, and a thunderstorm in your heart or brain. It can make you hear music all day even if the world around you seems music-less. When you pair this kind of writing about the outdoors with revisions with a friend who makes you dig deeper (pun intended) and who has a similar capacity for finding delight in his garden—a little something like an entire chapbook can happen. I’m happy to say that this summer, we’ll join forces again and will be working on more collaborative poem-ish projects involving trees. * This poem appears in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575851263541-Y64NM5YKNJS1IH6YP2VM/KKcomp2.jpg Issue 6 archive - Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575849914385-HO9DKEUPHOQVU1KFIFJF/BMcomp3.jpg Issue 6 archive - Amy Sayre Baptista & Carlo Matos Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575850119392-4JT87KNY7AUCCRSGXSO1/GEcomp2.jpg Issue 6 archive - Alicia Elkort & Jenn Givhan Life is beautiful, truly. Even in the dark. We might be moved by seeing the riot of pink bougainvillea next door and begin a conversation in a collaborative poem. One person sees in the pink leaves hope or transformation. The other might see a ripped pink dress. Together the texture of the writing is heightened. It can be an emotional experience, like singing a call and response. I speak a line, and “I hear you” comes back over the transom, in the context of the poem. What could be more healing than that being heard? We both feel blessed to have found a Sister Muse. Writing together is an immeasurable treasure. Our experiences share the theme of what it means to be a girl/woman in Western culture. Collaborative writing is a form of sharing experience that allows us to be heard (which itself is enough), and also to learn, to inform, to heal, and to uplift. In our collaborative writing we are creating and updating myths as a way of interpreting our pasts, and, in this, we are mentoring ourselves, our daughters, and the girls we hope will be strengthened by our poems. We wrote this poem to describe how we’ve had to teach ourselves to overcome inherited trauma—the trauma of the parent that is passed onto the child (if the parents had known better, they would have done better), and the trauma patterns repeated by the child. In the first version of the poem, written back and forth through email, we found what we wanted to say. It started with the first line Alicia emailed to Jenn: “I once was bound to my mother/rooted in the salty loam.” To which Jenn responded, “My mother was a box of rocks/weighted by the gold she craved.” As we continued, the theme developed. Once we had the skeleton of the poem, we could focus on craft, including word choice and form.Couplets benefit this poem by providing a way to order the traumatic experience and also arrive at something of elegance. Poetry takes our pain and lays it out on the page, a graphic demonstration of beauty. As for word choice, this is where collaborative writing can be incredible. Two people see different things and together can push the language in unusual and unordinary ways, partly like a random cut-up.Word choice develops organically from the synergy of the collaborative writing experience. This synergy creates a new spirit, a twofold spirit that allows for new energy and play. When we’re writing solo, we might want things to make more cognitive sense, more logical or linear sense, but working together, we accept and welcome the mystery of communal knowing; we don’t need all the answers individually, because together we form a more complete picture. In fact, when our collaborative writing fails, it’s usually because one of us hasn’t surrendered. All of this to say that the compound words in the diction like “brokenmothers,” “globemallow girls,” “firepitched”—all of these ideas meld together wisdom that we’ve arrived at together and allow us to keep working toward the heart of the collaborative spirit of healing. * This poem appears in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1575851551062-KA5FLZRDIOZQP11OWPAI/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-08-03%2Bat%2B7.31.29%2BPM.png Issue 6 archive https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-8-archive daily 0.75 2020-10-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603061547688-75QS1BKG3KMJM6KCXKO3/Naoko+Fujimoto+2020.jpg Issue 8 archive - Naoko Fujimoto The first draft was saved in my file in 2016, and the revision was published in my chapbook, Mother Said, “I Want Your Pain” (Backbone Press, 2018). The graphic poetry version of this poem is on POETRY Foundation’s website here. It depends on the poem; however, my editing process takes one of two extreme paths—either I revise head to toe, or I do a minor, targeted changes, like changing the grammar or comma placement (since English is my second language, there are ample opportunities to do this). The first draft branched into both the graphic version and written revision. In the graphic version, I focused on my theme, “Trans. Sensory” (Trans. has two meaning: translate & transport). I translate my writing in English to graphic poems, and I want my viewers to transport their senses from the flat paper and bridge the gap between words and images that will connect with their physical counterparts. Therefore, in the graphic version of “Lake Michigan,” there are parts that may take time to read (certain efforts to understand and connect words and images), which would tie with the main theme—time is necessary to process everything, and that develops the emotions around healing. Growing up in Japan, I spent a lot of summers by a fisherman’s port because of my health issues. There, my grandfather used to own a small house, which had a long, narrow path by broken stone steps down to a pebble beach (not beautiful white sand) with millions of crickets. So, my sister and I captured these insects and put them on our handmade boats. We also saw the sky, stars, and collected seashells, drifted branches, and the occasional dead thing. This poem (maybe all my poems) is a mix of my dream-like memories. Now, I am not sure how accurate I recall these experiences, but some parts around Lake Michigan, where I now live, trigger vivid flashbacks of everything around my childhood port being rusted. Of course, the lake is filled with fresh water, not salty like the Pacific Ocean, but the realization was shocking. I re-realize that I am far away from the ocean, my home. After spending all day at the beach, Lake Michigan does not stain my nostrils with iron particles. This poem contains the theme of miscarriage; therefore, I wanted to make it as personal as possible. Mixing up with my childhood memories and experiences may excite poetic chemical reactions. I also changed the structure and line-breaks hoping that some simplicity may support more emotional outputs. Despite the beauty of Lake Michigan, this poem represents a void—uncomfortable, pale images. The space-dent preceding the phrase “Clouds stretch” represents time, of unpleasant thoughts. Though, I am so lucky to be able to meditate on poems by both Lake Michigan and the Pacific Ocean throughout the seasons. It is fantastic to see fireworks by the lake and watch the ocean after the long flight to my city. Like revising poems, time is crucial to identify one little thing that may be needed to wrap a poem up. I used to not appreciate the aging process; however, time makes more visible something I may not currently see. Clearly, everything that these waves bring me keeps fueling new poems and the potential healing they may provide. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603060468230-AZ5GT3YPMZRAK2UX0D8B/abani+5.jpg.jpeg Issue 8 archive - Shayla Lawson Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603062222003-QK07UZ3BP5DRRALUVE9C/hoa%2Bnguyen%2B2.jpg Issue 8 archive - Hoa Nguyen My current manuscript directs poetry toward history, hauntings, and diasporic Vietnamese experiences as the poems draw upon and rankle with myth, musicality, documents, memory, biography, and the archive. There’s a relationship to pre-elegy in its diasporic echo—and with reference to the death of my mother in June 2019. The early draft here considers a literal photograph, rendering image through description and visual detail. The title came first; I had passed around cookies to a group of poets for a writing improvisation; mine arrived without a slip of paper inside (no fortune). In the first draft the poem moves with some predictability. I see some of my common poetry tendencies showing: description featuring details of women’s fashion and colour; a moment in which I “break the fourth wall” and refer to the act of writing; and the paratactic inclusion of a fact. I also saw, upon a second look, that the poem proposes something, points to it, but does not go beyond surface riffing, doesn’t go far from the description of the photograph. So I had to get to what the poem was proposing and what I was backing off of, to think of the photograph and set of references as moveable emblem or portal into a complexity. Returning to the poem, I put pressure on the themes of convulsive change, of fitting in despite invisibility and hypervisibility, of culture divides, trauma, and loss. In the final version, these themes are more directly addressed to evoke an experience or presence of isolation, longing, and survival. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603060584649-84RXV3EX6LWZ3S2NKFIJ/kentuckyist.jpg Issue 8 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603060907957-7VKQNOULDC8MKS8ADC8F/Raymond%252BAntrobus%252B101_Suki%2BDhanda.jpg Issue 8 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603061771945-OE5H65B22O8VPRETGZ7D/20531.jpeg Issue 8 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1603061224926-MCWNKO0GXYAO6DNA233X/Aricka%2BForeman_headshot.jpg Issue 8 archive - Aricka Foreman This poem came during an especially hot summer of a depressive episode. The “needle jitter” of its static seemed to linger behind the hum of a book. I have tons of drafts that slowly announce themselves as poems. I can’t think about a book until that hum turns up, closer to chorus than disparate utterances that flitter at the edges of the mundane. Revision began with my slight irritation with the first line. And then realizing the lines that followed were enacting the same strained, syncopated listing effect. “Here the illness,” felt too fixed of a location, and disabused me of the possibility to grapple with the subject matter as part of the I’s ecosystem. The language wanted to be actualized. I’d disassociated her from the world she inhabited. There’s so little power in that kind of repressed language tbqh. The final form took several months to change in slight increments. I’d walk away for days (weeks) at a time, removing a comma, a word or phrase to the preceding line, then again to the line that followed. Leaning on the syntax allowed the language to tell me how it wanted to root, grow. Removing “finite” punctuation seemed key in allowing an aliveness: in. What I found fascinating was this aliveness swelled and began to make room for all the things that were alive: autumn trees, couples walking down the block, the rich landscape of dreams against the brief soundtrack of passing cars. A duality emerged, present in the witness’ observations: what she witnesses in the world around her while simultaneously witnessing her own mercurial mind. What began as a catalogue later became seed. I traveled with that corporeality into other poems, especially in the last section of the book. Music plays a key factor in how I shape my poems, and where I follow them. If I’m listening clearly, a poem more interested in sense-making than making sense allows me to play with form, disjoint a linear narrative in service of valiance. But I do have to be careful not to be so seduced by music—even chopped and screwed—that I lose resonance or urgency. I play with prepositional locations, torque the music. It’s amazing how that shift drives the momentum of a poem depending on if they’re at the beginning or end vs the middle of a line in the poem. Shifting the grammar opens a door. Sheds some light. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-9-archive daily 0.75 2021-04-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618071238373-MSOZBSJTYE41XP7EWQIN/authorphoto_by_sallywenmao%2B%25281%2529.jpg Issue 9 archive - Aria Aber Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618070730846-VJINKL82CQOU6448LW1B/71ED6315-7895-4E1F-BF7A-A72B7E9AC344.jpeg Issue 9 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618070768358-JQ4BJ1KGUEWSOBCVDML3/08249C14-DB7A-449D-809F-41FF169DDE5C.jpeg Issue 9 archive https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618072337071-5O6EBD5EV41S0UD956EB/Nicole+Homer_EDIT-9818-2.jpg Issue 9 archive - Nicole Homer The original idea addressed the parent/child dynamic in terms of a child, the remembering speaker, walking in on the parents having sex and not understanding or not being able to name sex as sex. It was unruly and I’m not sure I knew the question I wanted to ask myself. Between the first and second drafts, the speaker’s position changes. Instead of the intrusive child, the voice is now that of put-upon parent. That dynamic remains, but now instead of a child’s movement towards what is that noise, the adult knows what the noise is and is, in some ways, the object of it. The noise is a clamoring for attention, a child’s plea to get a parent to side with them. The lines are irregular, and the enjambment feels accidental or arbitrary. I’ve divided it into rough scenes, separated by time or space (“every morning,” “in the kitchen,” “every day”). I’m still telling myself the story—or asking myself the question. My word choice is more intentional now. We have team, but also the arguing among the team members. A phrase that will eventually make it into the final draft "egg after egg after egg" first appears here. I’m talking both domesticity and procreation and all of its violence. But, I’m still not sure who it’s aimed at. Race enters the poem. It’s a costume and part of a larger heroic construction. The "white woman's face" is about a standard. (How) is this important? Is this only about costuming? I'm not sure yet, but I’m getting a better outline of the stakes. The other tension I’m poking at is a grotesque one—in the sense of insides going out or upsides going down. Wonder Woman's face is on the speaker's ass. This reversal of the natural order complicates the costume idea by making it (more) absurd. But, it's not a real costume as much as it is a team jersey, a uniform. That’s, perhaps, the question even if it is a pleading one: We’re a team, aren’t we? Even if we’re absurd, we’re a match set, right? With the next revisions, I look more intentionally at enjambment and stanza, but the tercets with their approximate one natural end stop each that the poem will eventually embody aren’t there yet. Neither is the color, American, but disordered, that will start the poem. What I ended with was not at all a poem about interrupting and misunderstanding sex between two parent figures. The shift, the largest in my revision process, to identify with the parent, the mother, who is constantly interrupted as a state of being and can barely name the violence and the inadequacy of parenting—the costume as mask as distraction as aspiration. As I wrote through it, I realized that the parents in the first draft didn’t have any answers either. • This poem originally appeared in Rattle. Photo by Nicholas Nichols. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618070580550-NMTOLT80XSNTIKTDE9BY/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-07-24%2Bat%2B8.29.15%2BPM.png Issue 9 archive - Evie Shockley I normally don’t have much to say about revision—not because I think it’s not important and certainly not because I consistently turn out publishable-quality first drafts. Instead, I think, my approach to revising is so organic and intuitive that I can’t articulate the reasoning in a meaningful way to others. It’s often quite incremental, on top of that; no dramatic before-and-after, in most cases. This poem struck me as a candidate for the underbelly forum because it had two fairly distinct false starts (a.k.a. rough drafts). The first was concerned primarily with celebrating the persistence of some of my Black feminist heroes whose work focused on electoral politics. I also wanted to weave some maternal family history into the piece, in a kind of counterpoint to the more iconic figures. I love to play with form, but in the initial draft, form was overwhelming the ideas rather than opening up the poem. The draft was just blah blah blah prose prose prose. The second draft downplayed form—I dropped into free verse using only visual line length as my formal measure—in favor of nailing down the voice and tone. That shift of focus allowed the poem’s interest in the vote itself to surface. I retained some nods to individual women I admire, but worked on trying to capture some of the many reasons why voting has mattered to me and for me. Did I mention that there are many reasons? The scope began to drift and balloon out of control. Even though neither rough draft made it to completion in my notebook (and I’m only providing the first pages of the incomplete drafts), the process of starting them both clearly fed the third draft, which I typed directly into my computer. I went with the voice and medium-short free verse lines that the second draft had produced. But I found a way to heighten the stakes using form, going back to the first draft’s intent to alternate between family history and national history. Further, as the poem had found its key idea in the contrast between what the 19th Amendment meant for Black women as opposed to white women, I was inspired (that gift!) to use children’s rhymes—revised to highlight and/or feminize their racial connotations and undertones—as transitions between the sections. The end result is the poem I contributed to the Academy of American Poets joint initiative with the New York Philharmonic, Project 19. * This poem was co-commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative, and appeared in the Spring-Summer 2020 issue of American Poets. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618071624830-L9SLTOELPYPT60U86TU6/Carlos%2Bperforming.jpg Issue 9 archive - Carlos Andrés Gómez This poem reckons with a brief, passing moment with my best friend in fifth grade, as we brushed our teeth before bed at a sleepover, which remains imprinted in my memory. I want to show this very rough first draft, and as a means of comparison with the finished draft in my book Fractures, because it typifies two of my Achilles’s heels as a writer: I overwrite and often feel drawn to interrogate what scares me but then struggle to be courageous in the excavation required (particularly in my early drafts). Put differently, I write around and away from what I tell myself I am confronting. Thankfully, my grad school advisor at the time, the brilliant and uncompromising C. Dale Young, received this first draft and crossed out half of the poem in red. Then, he challenged and guided me in a way that completely transformed this poem. First, he asked, “Why forsake the line?” He rightly pointed out that flouting lineation “give[s] up the tension between line and syntax that a poem like this needs.” What that form in the first draft did in this poem, as he noted, is “obfuscate.” He pushed me to be courageous and clear, told me that this poem “demands bravery and straight talk,” which, initially, completely disoriented me. That advice seemed to run counter to so much I had internalized about poetry (and what I thought it should be). I believed that a poem of such straightforwardness and clarity would inevitably lack depth or surprise. At that moment in my poetic orientation, I often conflated vagueness with mystery, unnecessary ornamentation with profoundness, when, quite to the contrary, streamlining language and casting one’s focus to the heart of what’s being explored often unearths the greatest surprise and, therefore, resonance. “Pronounced,” in this final draft, has remained one of the poems I hear from readers about the most. If nothing else, I think it proves that a poem guided by “bravery and straight talk” can be compelling. * Photo by Friends & Lovers Photography * Poem from Fractures by Carlos Andrés Gómez. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1618073621554-YO7Y35XFX45031QANU6E/IMG_0753.jpg Issue 9 archive - Bianca Lynn Spriggs This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://www.underbellymag.com/issue-10-archive daily 0.75 2021-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628351543385-2V8DZ7VFWL3M6HAQUVVV/FC+-+credit+Jasmine+Durhal.jpg Issue 10 archive - Franny Choi In 2015, an angry remark I made about racism in publishing ended up on a right-wing message board, and I was subsequently swarmed on Twitter for about three days. As an artist, I was fascinated by these tweets, which hit on the precise intersections of race, gender, and technology that I was thinking about at the time. As a human, I couldn’t look at them for very long without starting to feel terrible. So I decided to play a game: I would pick a handful of tweets, paste them into Google Translate, and process them back and forth into a bunch of languages until they became funny, or at least something other than simply hurtful. I ended up with lots of lines of garbled text and decided to try to use it to write a poem. In a way, writing with found text is revising. Once I had the “stuff” of the poem, I started cutting it up and rearranging it, letting myself be led by sound and feeling in order to find the poem’s arc. In the process, I found a few questions: What were the rules of the game (namely, how much was I “allowed” to modify the text)? Did I want to make some sort of argument, or simply present my findings? Who was “I” in a poem like this? In each of my first few drafts, a speaker emerged at the end to take over the language and remix it to say something new. I kept feeling unsatisfied with this; I didn’t really believe in the poem’s triumphant ending (and was, at the time, starting to feel suspicious of triumphant endings in general). Over the next few drafts, I moved toward keeping the language mostly unmodified by a separately-voiced speaker, and just ended on a particularly strange and resonant bit of found text. It turned out the poem wasn’t really about me at all, and that realization was surprisingly freeing. Other than that, my revisions focused primarily on making the poem more inviting and easier to read. The arc became more streamlined (kooky to dangerous), and the poem got shorter (less time in the bad place). At some point, I tried putting it into quatrains, and I liked the effect having such wild language contained in neat little boxes. Lastly, I gave it a new title in line with other poems in my book, and I think that helped establish a premise without forcing the speaker to show up and give a big speech. The poem has been published in a few places (including in my collection, Soft Science, on Alice James Books), but something about this process makes it feel unfinished. I still have questions, especially about the political stakes of reproducing violent language, even in this jumbled form. * "The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right" (poem) from Soft Science by Franny Choi, Alice James Books, 2019. Photo credit Jasmine Durhal https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628354190123-YI3J5FGWNXOOW9RQ5LHD/Derrick+Austin+Photo+Headshot.jpg Issue 10 archive - Derrick Austin Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628356382147-WUR9ZV4J57M5GFAVRPQT/Kundiman_Retreat_Portratits_2019_Margarita_Corporan-47+copy.jpg Issue 10 archive - Jan-Henry Gray This began through a prompt in a workshop led by W. Todd Kaneko at the Kundiman writers retreat where we looked at how poems (like Ada Limón’s “What I Didn’t Know Before”) can make metaphor happen by placing two things together. It was June, 2019, the summer my heart was breaking in one direction and filling in another. The up-and-down year had left me exhausted, raw. So, I relied on what was easy and tried only to say what was necessary—a kind of flattened urgency. After staring at the page for some time that morning, I remember the poem came spilling out. Exhaustion can lead to clarity. The poem begins like notes for a recipe. I’ve cooked in restaurants for years and I still cook nearly every day. I’ve attempted (and mostly failed) at writing recipe-poems in the past. Cooking comes easy but writing is hard. In the first draft, the word “clove” appeared three times on the same line midway through the poem, a signal that the poem wanted to clear the way for something else. I kept the echo going with the next images with “garlic” ... “garlic heart” and later with “It needs/ tending. Tendon. Time." Isn't echoing a kind of love? Call and response? Sympathetic vibration? All of this echoing surrounds the plain declarative sentence: “The language/ of the heart is stupid.” It’s a crude line; inelegant and obvious. If nothing else, it's a great excuse to say the word stupid in a poem. But, it’s what the poem was circling toward all along. And, it recalls the first line at the top of the previous page I wrote that morning: “the heart is just a muscle in want of any rhythm.” It also reminds me of something Sandra Oh’s character says in the very underrated Last Night (1999), a film that's about—and whose release date coincided with—pre-Y2K anxiety. In it, Oh’s character is on her way home when she meets someone and realizes that they're likely going to be spending their last few minutes on earth together. Opening the special bottle of wine intended for her husband, she tells the stranger: “Tell me something to make me love you.” It’s a line full of desperation, of course, but it’s also wildly romantic. In that moment, she wants to believe that it’s possible to fall in love with someone in an instant. During revision, I rearranged the lines into couplets and stretched them to make even, to-the-middle-of-the-page length lines. It felt right, if not obvious to do this. Love poem=couplets. Ditto the title. Meat=an unfussy four-letter word. I wanted to end with meat and the language of cooking. “So much happens to flesh" begins the move toward the poem's exit. Perhaps, there is more to say. I don’t know. Perhaps the poem, too, is inarticulate. * “Meat” first appeared in Jet Fuel Review https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628355619335-L0NTXJ93WUMCU7XPOVZO/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-04-10%2Bat%2B2.34.13%2BPM.png Issue 10 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628354776897-TL3A9EW1GIJYFUMEF8A0/combo+headshot.jpg Issue 10 archive - F. Douglas Brown I am the co-founder and co-curator of un::fade::able, a quarterly reading series honoring the legacy of Sandra Bland. Every reading, poets speak the hard truths for and with the slain Black lives in an effort to fight erasure and uplift the spirits of the community. In 2017, I wrote and performed “Re-Portrait :: Selfie,” in collaboration with violinist Yvette Cornelia Holzwarth for this series. Revision is always a collaborative effort. What Yvette and I put together happened quickly because the intentions surrounding the series had done the work for us. We both understood how grief worked lyrically and musically. We both knew we wanted to honor Bland. Before any films, or court decisions, or settlements, the best narrative that existed was Sandra Bland’s own voice, her livelihood, her humanity. What existed were a string of selfies, videos, words of encouragement from a young woman who had hope for the world that was trying to destroy her. Sandra Bland’s selfie game rejoiced in the delights of any given day. Her selfie game—fly and fashionable, in opposition to what the media had been portraying or failed to depict. We wanted to “re-portrait” her in her own light, the light a Black woman radiates. I had a working draft and Yvette started tinkering on the music based on the draft’s initial pace and tone. The stakes of collaborating with Sandra Bland, and of creating a portrait of her lead us to ask: what did her family know of her? How did she know herself? What is a better record of her personality? Why was an alternate narrative negating her existence? These questions changed the focus and direction of the poem and musical arrangement. I cut lines to make it as “snap-shot,” as “selfie” as possible. Yvette layered the tracks, to build Bland’s complexity despite the quickness of each lyrical section. A last edit was to give each section an entrance to show a change in pace as a new conversation with Bland. In this way, the poem attempts to speak to both the spectre and living Sandra Bland. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628354405378-1QPFDGCFE7KOS0Z7YERH/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-04-10%2Bat%2B12.13.26%2BPM.png Issue 10 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628355403801-D2MQ4RDV3CGHI8X8NF17/1%2Bpix%2Bre_portrait%2Bdrafts.png Issue 10 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628355555946-NCBFYBUMDLWAENDRPISX/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-04-10%2Bat%2B2.33.56%2BPM.png Issue 10 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628356724452-A5T94HPGV55T85PNY0CY/WilliamsP+Headshot.jpg Issue 10 archive - Phillip B. Williams This poem was born out of an erasure first. I have really begun to enjoy manipulating song lyrics through poems and finding ways that the lyric can have a new home in a poem format. I love “Idioteque” as a song because there are actually so few lyrics in it – it’s mostly a sonic experience. And so it challenged me to make the most of what language existed. And I think a thing about this entire process is finding homes for words next to other words that make sense. Or, creating the erasure and then seeing what narratives can be built out of it from there. I chose a thing about love and climate change, two things that have been overwhelming my brain lately. Will I be alive long enough to properly love everyone I love in the best ways I can. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/1628355437421-QBVYOW3Q18LOS0KL5HKU/2%2Bpix%2Bof%2Bre_portrait%2Bdrafts.png Issue 10 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/archiveissue12 daily 0.75 2022-05-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/c397c331-5232-406a-9533-8b239c1308ee/RM-88.jpg Issue 12 archive - Rachel Mennies “July 10, 2016” is the second poem from The Naomi Letters. As its inciting event it takes a snippet from local news, specifically from the East Side Pittsburgh neighborhood I was living in at the time: On September 20, 2016, a man jumped from the Forbes Avenue bridge that covers Frick Park. He did not survive. I first had the idea for this poem on September 21, 2016, while driving over this bridge—as I did to and from nearly everywhere I went. I pulled over and recorded a few snippets before continuing to work. This voice memo is a beautiful and rare artifact. Because the speaker had herself imagined taking the leap that the man made, the image that survived from draft to draft was of the poem’s speaker gauging the distance the man fell by dropping pebbles to the ground below. By then, I had just begun working on the poems that would become The Naomi Letters, so I hadn’t yet settled on its governing framework as a series of epistles written from the speaker to Naomi, all titled by their dates. I transcribed the voice memo and grew it into a poem draft by establishing the poem’s who-what-where: the man, the leap, the speaker on the bridge, the address to Naomi. Next, how to evoke in the reader what the speaker felt on that bridge? This shift nearly always requires moving from the narrative to lyric mode. There, I was able to conjure the speaker’s sense of gravity tugging her to the pavement, or else to the green below the bridge, through the hundred small stones, the single foot always remaining stubbornly in the world. The one narrative detail that eluded me until the end of the first full draft—I wish I could remember if this realization arrived on my actual first writing or later, I am not certain—was where the poem needed to end. Should we stay on the bridge? Eventually, I realized that, if this poem were to focus on survival, the poem’s narrative present needed to be an after to the scene on the bridge. That took me to the idea of the speaker viewing the bridge from a different, safer vantage: the window inside her apartment, closing with an appeal to Naomi that the disclosure of the memory marks not an ending, but a beginning. The date-title also changed as the broader set of poems grew, becoming “[7/10/2016]”: I realized that I needed this inciting event to happen earlier in the summer for the speaker, for it to make sense in the story arc. By February of 2017, I had enough drafts written to send to one of my most cherished readers, the poet Kimberly Quiogue Andrews—the changes between the two complete, non-final drafts are thanks to her thoughtful edits. The final version of this poem didn’t arrive until 2018, when I was working on revising the entire rough manuscript draft. By then, I had committed to the date-titles as well as their format, so “[7/10/2016]” became “July 10, 2016” and I removed some of the “Naomi” direct-addresses in keeping with a rule I tried to follow across the collection, which was not to mention her name in a poem more than once. “July 10, 2016” remains one of the most dear-to-me poems in the book, in part because it sparked the first long thread that the book follows: a deep study of the speaker’s survival of her mental illnesses—a study of my own survival. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9333ed1e-d71f-4f69-adb7-011f6366cd82/2FA53F55-DF75-48AC-9742-18E1B3A828A3.jpg Issue 12 archive - Faylita Hicks Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/98f020b6-2fad-4a12-8d64-3716b41062e9/The+Garden+of+Gethsemane+draft+2.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/94f176d9-b419-42a1-8b2d-d518adaef728/Screen+Shot+2021-12-23+at+10.35.01+AM.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/296d2837-1efe-4fea-9a72-96d61e7dc724/Picture1.jpg Issue 12 archive - Soham Patel In June 2021 I visited my friend the poet Jenny Johnson in Pittsburgh and we played a version of a game Patrick Rosal introduced at a Kundiman workshop. When Jenny and I play (we call the game wordball) we make a list of some topics we’ve discussed recently then list words we associate with that topic. We also make a list of action verbs, for action. Once we have a healthy list of words one of us will pick up a book we are currently reading and read a sentence or line from it. Then we both write down that sentence or line. Then one of us will keep writing while the other throws the words out for the catching. The idea is the writer will incorporate whatever word’s thrown out into what they are currently writing. This, of course makes for lots of leaps. When I typed out the journal page today for Underbelly, I couldn’t read some of my writing. Once I started to revise, I wanted a steadier story for the reader so I tried to particularize one from the game exercise. You can win wordball if you happen to be writing the word being thrown out at the very moment it’s thrown. I did that once. For this game our topics were “things you can compost” and “religious words.” Pittsburgh has a lot of repurposed churches, some have become bars. I used to live there and am always very nostalgic when I return, and I notice this affect in this “Brunch Poem” draft. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/57d53e73-0319-44ec-8eca-c1d317e4322f/Screen+Shot+2021-12-23+at+10.36.10+AM.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/80a79bdd-0b95-4459-b5c7-a35de35b0156/IMG_5435.jpg Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/eb7d4379-3a9d-42c6-8311-56443aa05bb3/The+Garden+of+Gethsemane+draft+2.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/16149f59-fa59-450e-ae42-2324b0e3c4d7/July+10+2016+final+image.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/b1c81493-3b98-40bd-a84d-779fb35d224c/Soham+First+Draft.jpg Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9fb00b9c-f2c0-43d9-9641-14aeea8d2bee/Malika+Booker+portrait.jpg Issue 12 archive - Malika Booker My current project uses the King James version of the Bible as its stimulus, so I was thrilled BBC Radio 2 commissioned a composition responding to “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane” for their Easter program. I began by re-reading the biblical verses, before picking up my notebook and pencil. These poems started with pages of explorations scribbled with my sharp HB pencil. I gathered random words: limbo, crossroad, asylum, shrine, mosquitos, and Afro (the Jesus in my poem would be a black, Caribbean man) to spark ten to twelve lines of lyrical statements and questions. Of these, “What would the trees whisper that night?” remains in the poem, while lines like: “Your will was at the crossroad” and “the surface was potholes and stones” have been discarded. These became prompts for several freewrites. The first explored the notion that Jesus wanted his own vigil, and I tried to imagine how his vigil in the garden would look and feel juxtaposed against his reality. During these explorations I addressed Jesus as you—for example: “you wanted your own vigil. . . , hmmm what would it look like?” As I explored, I captures sounds, scents, and explored Jesus’s psychological and emotional mindset. Then I responded to the following questions: • What if Jesus wanted a Caribbean wake? • How did Jesus feel about the actions of his fellow disciples that night? • How did Jesus feel about his father and the prophesy? • How do I the poet feel about the disciples? • What could Jesus see in his future that scared him? These questions generated lyrical lines and images, a grounded knowledge of both character and place, and a certainty about the psychological terrain I was navigating. Next, I looked for a quote from those gathered in my notebook to kick-start the poem. Kym Hyesoon’s: “The tomorrow that escape from your body turns around to look at. . .” felt apt. Then I hunted for poetic leaps or unusual, quirky details. I researched the geographical location of the original garden and its fauna. It was a miracle to discover that Shamrock leaves close at night. The leaves simply fold in from the central vein. This gesture became an overarching symbolic detail in the final poem. Lastly, I created the following brief: Read your freewrites and underline key lines. Use those to write a sixteen-line draft in couplets. I shaped these couplets into a single-stanza draft, and once it was satisfactory, I typed it into Scrivener to be edited. As you can see, the poem required minimal changes given the substantial exploratory work I had conducted beforehand in my notebook. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/f29425a7-63f1-46a6-a30c-a201508448b2/IMG_5436.jpg Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/456e5d51-8832-43cc-84c3-6a19a198f1f2/IMG_5434.jpg Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/ed1bbe2b-d442-4508-bc27-95c6de47eaea/Screen+Shot+2021-12-23+at+10.25.31+AM.png Issue 12 archive - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/bc709db7-f9c1-4c56-b1f8-106e71fe448d/Baker_Headshot+%28Dean+Davis%29.jpg Issue 12 archive - Quenton Baker In music, I would compose line by line in my head, while listening to the beat I was working on, to find a rhythm or a rhyme structure that wasn’t too regular. When I left music and started writing poems, that trait followed me. So, mostly, by the time I get to the page, the poem has gone through a thousand iterations and false starts in my mind. Revision is about making sure I’ve pushed the poem to its limit. In music, there was a sixteen-bar verse that I was trying to fill, so the endpoint was predetermined. Since I write in free verse, the poem itself dictates where its end should be. In revision I’m making sure I’ve reached that endpoint, for real, and not just because I’ve hit my own breaking point with endurance or focus or patience. The poem’s limit, of course, doesn’t just apply to its length, but all of its corresponding parts; I’m trying to push the sonic weight of each line to its limit, push the form to its limit, push the precision in the language to its limit, push the efficacy of each image to its limit. And perhaps it’s not the poem’s limit at all, but rather my limit within the poem. For me, poetry has always meant reframing what’s possible. Gwendolyn Brooks and Aimé Césaire changed my understanding of what’s achievable within a poem, so that’s the limit I’m trying to push up against. I want every poem I write to have been impossible for me before I wrote it. So that means I have to push to surprise myself, through images, through associative language, through sonic patterns, to arrive somewhere I couldn’t have conceived of before I began. In the excerpt below (from ballast, a book-length work), the early draft is shorter, missing some polish and urgency in its language. For me, the poem is an immediate thing; the urgency comes from the precision in language and the energy of the line, as attended to by sound and sense. So, the first change I made was “this ship as” to “this ship is”—that slight increase in directness pushes the reader along a bit more forcefully, because it’s the present tense and because of the assonance between “this” and “is.” Similarly, “rough hewn shore” to “rough hewn bone,” and the cutting of the rest of the line, is in service to image consistency. The image of shore is at odds (and not in a tension-building way) with the rest of the poem, so during revision that choice revealed itself as a misstep. The big change of the added last stanza and the shift to the penultimate stanza were because I didn’t enjoy how the form was working. These poems are meant to/able to be read in any direction (from the bottom up, any stanza in any order, etc.), so my revisions for this project had to constantly keep that reality of the form front and center. https://www.underbellymag.com/underbelly-archive daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://www.underbellymag.com/tester daily 0.75 2023-05-20 https://www.underbellymag.com/test daily 0.75 2023-05-20 https://www.underbellymag.com/felicia-zamora daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/aa80a68a-e5cd-4087-b42a-e821a048f9d0/Screenshot+2025-03-23+at+5.25.18%E2%80%AFPM.png Felicia Zamora - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/00918cd0-db43-42e3-95ae-cd012d55a7b5/FeliciaZamoraAuthor.png Felicia Zamora - Felicia Zamora Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/6f384552-a3c5-4890-98df-54a6ccaf8460/First+Draft+-+Step+One+-+Zamora.jpeg Felicia Zamora - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/2ab380b3-9dbc-4563-822a-1821f5151793/Screenshot+2025-03-23+at+5.26.43%E2%80%AFPM.png Felicia Zamora - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/0101c4cb-bc25-48bc-a648-2bfe3204ee4d/First+Draft+-+Step+Three+-+Zamora.jpeg Felicia Zamora - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/5785fedd-9546-41c9-89f2-b875608beddb/First+Draft+-+Step+Two+-+Zamora.jpeg Felicia Zamora - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/juliana-spahr daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/9fb30ae7-175a-4c3f-89ae-ff3ab26321be/Juliana+Spahr+author+photo.jpg Juliana Spahr - Juliana Spahr Text here re: the revision process https://www.underbellymag.com/caki-wilkinson daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/8d248f68-2e94-44c1-9842-6b5e2d1f309b/Caki%2BWilkinson.jpg Caki Wilkinson - Caki Wilkinson Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://www.underbellymag.com/spotlight-kim-addonizio daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/fe497093-2260-4b61-9d45-38507677ddd6/Screenshot+2025-03-23+at+5.05.30%E2%80%AFPM.png Spotlight: Kim Addonizio - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/3c90c961-676d-4d7f-9b6d-dd5c10439f04/Kim+author+photo+final+B%26W+1.8.jpeg Spotlight: Kim Addonizio - Kim Addonizio Irène Mathieu: furnace The poem "furnace" came from a story my grandmother told me about watching her mother fry calas (beignets) with hard sauce in the same furnace they used for laundry when she was child in 1920s New Orleans. This was in the context of many conversations with my grandmother about her life, as well as my own research about Creole women of color in the early 20th century. I loved the idea of the furnace as a period-specific piece of domestic equipment that could symbolize a variety of things to different people depending on their age and position within a family. I was also interested in how domesticity can be oppressive for women, and how that oppression is learned or inherited.I tend to write into my perceptions, and editing helps me achieve clarity about what I'm perceiving, sometimes with the help of poet-friends. Putting the poem away for a few weeks also is useful; often I keep opening up a poem subconsciously for days or weeks after I've written a first draft. For "furnace," the poet Kimberly Reyes in particular pushed me toward clarity, and after arriving at this final version I was able to better articulate my intentions in this poem. https://www.underbellymag.com/mark-nowak daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/859ea634-4a87-4b76-a185-99f5aa9ca3db/Author+Photo+Credit+Mark+Nowak.jpeg Mark Nowak - Mark Nowak Text here re: the revision process https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/12b1e425-573b-4ddf-abe4-90eddc837494/Screenshot+2025-03-23+at+5.41.41%E2%80%AFPM.png Mark Nowak - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/78a9992c-3ecd-4948-93f8-f4326ee6cf01/Screenshot+2025-03-23+at+5.45.03%E2%80%AFPM.png Mark Nowak - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.underbellymag.com/rosebud-benomi daily 0.75 2025-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4218ef6576e84f90ccd31/15533a19-03d4-4501-8344-03b7ddc79a11/IMG_4955.jpg Rosebud Ben-Omi - Rosebud Ben-Oni Text here re: the revision process