This is a black oystercatcher. We hear them south and see a mated pair to the north on walks. This photo was taken at a distance using a zoom.

During April, I gave my students poems. Poetry was one of the fatalities of the misguided school reforms of a couple decades ago which insisted English teachers toss most of our curriculum in for a focus on nonfiction. Don’t get me wrong, I had always included nonfiction in my curriculum, but we all deserve poetry in our lives. We all deserve stories, and we should have respect for fiction, since all the ancient texts, all of scripture everywhere in the world involves the supernatural.

“Actress Amber Tamblyn is a passionate poet, and the above quote ‘eat poetry so that your body is made of it’ reminds me of something she said in an interview. When asked ‘why do we need poetry?’ she said, ‘Because we are the poem. Poetry is the thing you don’t write, it’s the thing you feel, it’s what you kiss, it’s what you sleep in, it’s what you smell, the way in which we need each other, the way in which we understand death without having experienced it.’ “

Weird Revision 

These are mind tricks. They won’t make a lot of sense on their own, but like freewrites, they are intended to force your brain to cough up what it’s hiding. Give them a chance to allow you to revision your own work.

Use one page for each revision strategy. You may back up to a previous draft, continue with the one you just made, or better, combine lines & words from drafts to create your BEST POEM. Edit the altered poem so it makes sense & becomes more vivid.  Assume that most of what you try will be unsuccessful — nevertheless, try to learn from each new draft.  Always, choose the distinctive verb, the specific noun. 

Check for sound! Maya Angelou called poetry “music for the spoken voice.” Yes, it is. 

Read each draft aloud!  Weird revision strategies:

• • • alter the tense and point of view—try observer narrator, for example 
    • cut your poem into a series of pairs of stanzas which “talk back” to one another 
    • make the lines twice as long or half as long
    • rewrite the poem as prose and the rewrite the prose with linebraks as poetry
    • cut into stanzas of rhymed couplets, or unrhymed stanzas of three lines
    • revise the entire poem as a form poem: a villanelle or sestina if you really want to work hard
    • make all the lines are of the same number of syllables <—my favorite
    • introduce a (new) metaphor to represent your message in the poem  
    • try reversing the order of the lines in a poem.  e.g. write the last line of your poem at the top so the line order is reversed

Try more than one of these techniques—give each one a chance to help you make your poem better. Begin with your 20-minute poem, revise using a strategy. Copy out the changed poem and then either try another revision strategy with this new version or go back to the original and revise again from there. Mark up each draft, making a mess, and then copy it out clean when it becomes hard to read. Do that over and over. With each step, make it better—cleaner, brighter, richer, more alive, more true!

NOTE: This is my final writing assignment. I promised to post five assignments and here is number five, but since there has been no response, I feel free to stop.