How to Revise a Poem
some thoughts on chicken broth
My dad’s cooking is easily the best perk to sharing a pandemic pod with my parents. He makes pretty much everything from scratch—including his own broths and stocks. Like writing a poem, this is a process requiring labor and patience.
The other night, we had a roast chicken dinner and he called for me to “save everything—all the scraps” as I cleared the table. Then we got down the stock pot and threw in the chicken carcass. And all the bones. And all the scraps of skin and gristle. (Full disclosure: I snuck my dog a chunk of dark meat because she was doing the Big Eyes.) And then my dad flung open the fridge and grabbed a bunch of parsley. He threw it in the pot. Then he threw in some leftover vegetables from dinner. And some freshly peeled carrots. A few ribs of celery. A withered apple, some red grapes. Anything he thought might add to the flavor. We poured in water and let it all on an extra-low simmer overnight.
And this, more often than not, is how I start a poem. I throw a bunch of scraps onto the page: the blue jay outside my window, a wise and funny thing my sister says, a fact I hear on NPR, some joy, some dread, a decades-old memory. I work fast at this stage, grabbing any available sound or image that I sense will add to the flavor of the poem. And then I leave everything to sit for a few days.
The broth simmered for hours and hours. My dog and I twitched our noses every time we walk past. Dad lifted the lid and stirred every so often, or poked the bones and vegetables around.
I open my notebook from time to time and stir the draft around. I doodle around the edges. I underline any phrases that I think are part of the poem’s essence. And I cross out words that don’t fit. I write myself questions in the margins (for some reason this helps even when I never come up with an answer to the question).
When the broth is finished cooking, it is fragrant and golden—and full of bones and clumps of vegetable. It smells good, but doesn’t look edible. It has to be strained first. It gets poured through a colander, and then through a fine sieve. Once all the bones and vegetables and parsley leaves—which give the broth so much flavor in the first place, but also keep it from becoming pure liquid—are strained out, we have an elixir far better than anything poured from a can.
It takes me a long time to properly stain a poem. I think of typing the poem, or transferring it from notebook to laptop, as running it through a colander. I catch the big stuff that doesn’t belong to the poem then. But it takes me months of reading aloud, and tinkering (sometimes you have to add salt and pepper to broth too), and setting aside, and reading again, and deleting a word, and fidgeting with punctuation, to run a poem through my revision sieve. But the poem is always deeper for it.
Nothing that goes in the pot or on the page gets wasted, only transmuted. Even the words and lines we ultimately discard help to shape and season the poem.
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