Overwrite / Underwrite

A strategy I’ve found helpful when working with a recalcitrant poem at any stage is to overwrite/underwrite. The idea is this: take the problem poem and pump up the volume—write in all the little details you left out because you didn’t think they were relevant, add plenty of descriptors, add the action that gets us from point A to point B that your better angels whispered to leave out, get more associations and images in there, go all out. Elaborate. Complicate. Give the poem a hefty dose of growth hormone. You can either take the frame of the existing poem and add to it, or start from scratch and just take the original idea and go baroque.

When you’re as done as you’re going to be, step back and take a look. It’ll seem unwieldy at first, but try to find the hotspots, the power points, the places of essential energy. Then—surprise—reduce the whole thing to a gesture drawing. Try to capture in as few strokes as possible the thing you need to say. Compress until your poem releases the essential oil contained in its petals.

In this process of elaborate and compress, best carried out over several sessions, you’ll learn something important about the poem you were trying to write. Now use that new knowledge, that new feeling, to write the poem as it was meant to be, neither overdone nor underdone, but this time, just right.

Image: Nikolai Roerich