Joy in the Delete Key

I spent July in Revision Mode and deleted hundreds of words. Maybe thousands (if you delete words, write new words to replace them, and then delete those words, does that double your delete count?). My net word count for the month is definitely in negative numbers.

I deleted the usual suspects: articles, adjectives, and adverbs. I cut opening lines. I cut closing lines. I got rid of entire sentences and stanzas. I let go of images that detoured too far from the centers of poems. And I abandoned entire poems that didn’t fit in either of the two big projects I’m concentrating on at the moment.

And yet, it was a month of process/progress, of transmutation, and, yes, (slow) forward momentum. It’s fun and exciting to draft new work—and I’ve missed that excitement. But pausing to take stock and to winnow down existing work is, for me, an equally urgent and vital part of writing.

Hitting the delete key isn’t about undoing ‘mistakes’ or punishing myself for throwing a whiny/moody line into a poem (this is just how poems come out in November) or even about ‘polishing’ the poem. It’s about discerning what the poem doesn’t need (what doesn’t ring true, what pulls the poem out of its orbit, what weighs the poem down) so that I can give the poem what it does need. It’s about spotting/hearing the words (or punctuation) that impinge on the poem’s momentum and filtering them out so that the poem can move freely across the page or through the reader’s mouth.

Giving myself time and permission to delete (and even abandon) work is also an opportunity to clarify my intentions—to decide where I most want to focus right now and to set aside lines or poems that distract from that focus. It’s a chance to think “not this, not this, and, instead, that!” and to hone the poem or the manuscript toward that.