Stepping Back to See the Big Picture
About a year before Acoustic Shadows was picked up for publication, I was feeling very stuck. I knew that the collection didn’t quite have the momentum it needed, but every time I tried to steer the poems into a better order using logic or historical chronology, I wound up with a stiffer, less interesting manuscript. I decided to take an entirely new approach—something more visual and intuitive.
I was inspired by games of Dixit and by Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit (she recommends stepping back to look for patterns in the way prose moves across the page). But my biggest model was the strategy the British Navy developed to protect itself from Nazi submarines and fight the Battle of the Atlantic (I’d just read A Game of Birds and Wolves and written the poem “War Games” and felt deeply drawn to the method of mapping the whole battle out on a linoleum floor, understanding how different ships and subs moved in relation to one another, trying and failing and trying again). When I see multiple threads of my research, reading, writing, and life suddenly weaving together, it is almost always a sign that I am on the right track—so I commandeered my parents’ ping-pong table and a box of markers and got to work.
I printed out my whole manuscript and used markers to track the weather and atmosphere in each poem. That makes it sound too elegant; really, I just drew blue squiggles for ocean poems and green squiggles for land poems, then I drew little black ovals for poems in submarines and little black houses for poems in homes (and both for the poems straddling both worlds). Then I started spreading poems across the ping-pong table (not an essential tool, but it happened to be a nice ocean-blue color and the net gave me a convenient way to divide Part I poems and Part II poems). I stepped back far enough that I couldn’t read individual words and kept shuffling poems until I liked the mix of land and water and the movement between the two. Then I used my birds’-eye view to look at the form of the poems and to make sure that the poems were cycling through a variety of different forms and not getting stuck in any one particular shape.
And then, once I’d shuffled things around and around, I let myself look at the words on the page again and see the new conversations between poems that my shuffling had revealed. Then I tweaked the order of the poems to highlight some word connections, then I stepped back to track the atmosphere visually, then I removed some poems because they just didn’t fit, I stepped close again, and so on, for several hours. By the end of the day, I had a new structure for the manuscript, one that is pretty similar to the published version (though I wrote and added a handful of poems after the Big Remodel).
There are lots of ways to adapt this strategy for different projects and with different materials. You could use stickers or stamps to track particular characters/elements/colors/seasons etc. through your poems. You could tape the poems to wall of your apartment or use a laundry line for a vertical visual experience. You could paperclip a tarot card to each poem—or a photograph, leaf, or dried flower. You could use different colored stones as paperweights or use toys or knickknacks to visually represent the poems. The idea is simply to find a way to step back from the individual words in individual poems so that you can show yourself the tone/feeling/atmosphere of each poem—and re-envision how all the poems might work together.
