The five poems I chose to revise were the poems that went through workshop rather than any of the field poems. Each one was made with a different poetry craft in mind though by the end of the revisions, some drifted from that original craft. This essay will explain the changes made to each poem in several drafts, the crafts used and how they all were purposely used to make each poem unique and purposeful.  

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Motionless 

This poem was originally written in second person and attempted to use imagery throughout to convey a feeling of loss. However, the imagery used was only vivid and powerful in a few lines such as the one below:  

You wash those socks every two weeks as if they had been worn. 

This made the poem feel like it was holding back, and the imagery seemed more abstract, making it hard to convey the feeling of loss I was hoping would show. In my first draft, I wrote it with myself as the reader so some of the lines don’t make sense or have the impact, they were meant to have without the context I didn’t write.  

In the second draft I played a bit with line break at the beginning and pulled back to only the skeleton of the poem. Instead of going for a vivid imagery with context, I decided to make the poem even more detached and abstract to give the image of someone not wanting to connect with what is gone. I also tried to make the poem constrained visually by making it blow up in the fourth stanza, leading up with increasing the number of lines on the previous ones from one to four. I then returned to only including one word on the last line and creating a connection between the things left and the speaker in relation to the person gone. However, because the first use of the things was abstract and detached, the connection at the end was hard to feel.  

Over the next few drafts I continued to try and make something surprising with line breaks but concluded that I was doing this with the wrong line and not doing it enough. I had tried to make the first line surprising, but this worked better for the poem when it was the last line of the stanzas instead. I kept the line break at the end of the stanza but made it into a full sentence to let the reader decide what is meant by both lines.  

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I’m still. 

Here. 

You're still. 

Gone. 

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These lines should be able to be interpreted as “I’m still here” while the other person is gone, or as they are still, motionless, after the person left.  

On the final draft, I made indentions to show motion, tried to combine abstract meaningless things with vivid memory and connect the things to the speaker by borrowing lines from each stanza on the last. The indentions came after reviewing another poem in class in which this tactic was used to show motion. Since the fifth stanza is where I tried to create vivid imagery, I wanted to create the illusion of the speaker drifting away from reality and into a memory. I wanted to keep the connection I tried to make on the second draft between the things and the speaker, so the last stanza starts with “I” but uses lines that were previously used for the things the person left behind. This was done with the intention of a ‘final realization’ where the reader realizes the things are just projections of the speaker. This comes after the fifth stanza, where the speaker has gone and come back from the memory and is ready to admit that they are the one that was left behind as well. The use of “I” and the imagery used on the fourth stanza were also to show there was feelings behind the detached version of them in the beginning.  

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Pulse 

This poem was originally using the persona craft and somewhat continued on the final version. It was difficult to write since it was about the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida a few years ago, which I did not experience nor witnessed. It was written in first person and in one of the drafts (not included in portfolio because it was very short), I tried to make it more personal with the first person. Not wanting to make a mistake, I wrote from my perspective of going to a club and thinking of what a person may have felt the night of the attack. However, this made the poem more about me than about the event and felt like I was using a tragedy and claiming it as my own. For this reason, I went the opposite direction and wrote from a more distant place.  

One of the comments on the revision was that numbers seemed important but also held no meaning. I had included the numbers because I felt it was important to remember each individual person that died from the shooting, so I kept the number of forty-nine in the final draft. To give it meaning, I made the people be symbolized by beats in several stanzas. The beats were personified to be alive and later bleeding. The lines 

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The beats begin to bleed 

First one   .    then five    .   then forty nine 

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allude to the beats being human and give meaning to the dots spread on the poem. I had originally included punctuation but decided to take it out to make each  .  have the same meaning and purpose. There are forty-nine periods or dots in the poem and are meant to be beats (both musically and heartbeats) but also people. I was unsure on how to space them so that could still be improved upon on later drafts. However, for this final draft the spacing was decided to start close and end distant, in a way to symbolize going from an intimate close space to scattered in panic and later just another event on television.  

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Together? 

The first draft (draft 0) of this poem was written around 2014 to write a song. The first draft (draft 1) submitted for workshop was a very revised version of the original but created a confusing narrative as it was now dealing with the original and new subject matter. Draft 0 was about figures of authority and being used as test in order to know how to deal with future scenarios. Draft 1 was more about relationships and the off-balance in power dynamics found there. 

Draft 1 used questions to be a repetitive theme and create a sense of confusion for the reader. The confusion was meant to parallel the confusion of the speaker towards the relationship but because of the mixture from Draft 0, this confusion was too abstract.  

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The first draft only changed in format as I originally also tried to make it a bit of a conversation going from the speaker and another to the speaker and the self. However, the problem of clarity persisted and was more important than the problem with formatting. I decided to keep the narrative of a speaker talking directly to the other person in the relationship throughout the whole poem. I also chose a metaphor in one of the drafts and decided to expand on it during the final version. This seemed to work as it made it just abstract enough to not be too straight-forward while also giving something concrete to anchor down the poem. 

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From the second draft I wanted to have a surprising change in line with enjambment. While the one used in earlier drafts didn’t end on the final draft, the ones that were used were able to show the damage and force that keeps the speaker in the relationship.  

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Winter Without Yellow 

This poem is an abecedarian broken into six stanzas to represent six different time periods in the speaker’s life. The use of Spanish was meant to have a closer connection to good times and family with the speaker as it is used less when the speaker encounters hardships. While there was a lot of imagery throughout the poem and good line breaks, the ending stanza did not match the rest. Taking one of the poetry revision’s advice, I went line by line to try and make them all powerful and meaningful. I found this to be a difficult revision since I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the lines as part of the stanza rather than individually. To combat this, I decided to rewrite the whole abecedarian but backwards (still starting on D, just going to C instead of E).  

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The backwards revision allowed me to focus on each line but, the poem did not work as well since it was in past-tense going further into the memory. I made to versions of this but only included one in the portfolio as the first one made almost no sense as a whole and only helped create a base from where to start again. The more I tried to change the backwards abecedarian, the more I felt it became distant as it continued go farther from the ‘now’. For this reason, I rewrote it one more time in the original version of it, now using the new lines that came from the revision. This version did not include as much Spanish as the first one but did use it in the intimate parts of the speaker’s life. Diciembre was meant to be different from a regular December and is why it is in Spanish, while also showing the speaker only has a deep connection with her brother. On the original poem, the focus seemed to be on the father, but I found the heat of the poem to really be in the relationship with the brother instead. I kept the passage of time being set by each new stanza going forward and kept some of the imagery I had used before but also included a bit more metaphors.  

 

 

Waterfall 

This poem was especially difficult to revise because of the formatting I needed to keep. While I considered just getting rid of the format all together if it took away from the message of the poem, I felt like a pantoum really worked to show the passage of time in life and seasons. The idea for this poem came from two lines I wrote during class this semester:  

 

Time is floating down the waterfall. 

I love you but only because you’re not here.  

 

This along with a challenge on myself to use something abstract and make it entirely concrete (making time a place and destination) is what ultimately inspired the poem into what it is. 

My first draft focused on making each line count and creating powerful imagery. Because I was focusing on each line so much, the narrative of the overall poem was a bit difficult to follow in certain cases. One of the suggestions was to have more enjambment in the poem to show there is less control since it is dealing with time. While I did not create much enjambment, I did make the sentences run for longer than one line. This was not done to show the restriction of control but rather to build on the imagery of time being fluid and leading to a waterfall. I also changed a bit of the sentences when they are repeated to help build a stronger narrative and solidify the time in which each stanza takes place (mostly by changing the tenses from present to past). The final line was one I debated on because I didn’t know if to change it to “We are here.” instead of “We’re not there”. This would change the meaning entirely as it would mean they are not loved but also give them a place to be since it is never specified in the poem where they are in time. I decided to keep it the way it is because it brought the poem to where it was at the beginning, making the rest of the stanzas be more of a memory as they arrive to the waterfall. The speaker was at the waterfall in the beginning and the end of the poem, with the in-between being the journey of how they got there. I think the sixth stanza helps with that as it has summer pointing towards the waterfall and later it is implied that summer has passed. While the line “We are not there” at the beginning meant Spring, the use of it in the last stanza could be interpreted more as them being gone.