That’s it, folks. I am giving myself until the end of this month to finish up my edits on Diwata, as I have done the major revision, and there is no reason not to finish the thing. It’s like going for the final kill. I’ve been fortunate to have readings here and there in the past few weeks, and have taken the opportunity to again read from Diwata, hear the awkward, tongue twisting, mouthful of peanut butter or metal moments in the work. I’ve known intuitively that the words and phrases I struggle over when performing would have to be rethought and reworked, that I’d have to honor enjambments and line breaks. It was timely to hear a couple of authors articulate these common sense items, which I think we conveniently forget when we get stubborn about revision and editing.
Sesshu Foster, in his recent City Lights Books reading (this past April or May) answered Oscar’s question about his use of the prose poem by saying that he didn’t want to be cute about enjambment. When a poet makes that conscious enjambment decision in the writing of the poem, does the poet honor that enjambment in the performance of the poem? If not, then what’s the point?
Paul S. Flores, in Willie Perdomo’s VONA class on the manuscript, talked about reading and performing as an editing tool; the words and phrases which are always awkward or difficult to speak without stammering, stumbling, badly mispronouncing, losing your breath need to be rethought. Perhaps it’s a matter of line breaks or punctuation, but sometimes it really is a matter of letting go of these words and phrases. Again, this is very common sense stuff, but I know how stubborn I get, and I know how attached folks can be to certain words and phrases, because they sound so cool or because of sentimental reasons. I don’t know that revision, editing, and sentimentality can all be friends, and I don’t believe that “because it sounds good” is a good enough reason to keep it.
This last go around with the manuscript is like jettisoning excess weight, and then polishing it to a high shine. There is one piece I still can’t rework, nor can I excise it. It’s good to give myself until the end of this month, which is fast approaching, to decide what to do and to do it. I have decided upon an end notes page, and actually, this makes me think back on Bryan Thao Worra’s On the Other Side of the Eye, for which I wrote the foreword. I reference his end notes page, his “glossary,” which is itself a creative work, and a slick bit of authorial mediation disguised as an objective document. For my own end notes page, I don’t mean to be slick, though I certainly do not mean to provide objectivity either. What is the middle ground here? I have to remember the reason why I’ve decided on an end notes page is because much of the attribution type information in the manuscript actually feels like it makes the body clunky. If I want the reader to have a smooth enough read through what is already a body of intricately interconnected poems, then the path through it needs to be cleared.
That’s it. I have a week and a half.
Good luck with the final kill.
I can see and respect what Foster is doing in World Ball Notebook and the point of his comment about enjambment, but when you ask “When a poet makes that conscious enjambment decision in the writing of the poem, does the poet honor that enjambment in the performance of the poem? If not, then what’s the point?”—I would just say that the two (reading it aloud and writing it down) are two separate enterprises and are certainly (usually) experienced differently as a reader or a listener. There are also moments within each line, I would guess, where caesura, speed, or other pacing concerns come into play aside from just the end of the line. If anything, I think I “honor” or accentuate internal punctuation (as they affect pace) rather than the enjambment during a reading of a poem.
Can’t wait for Diwata.
Hi Lee
Thanks for your comment. I hear some poets say what you are saying here, but I have to respectfully disagree with you. Form is what guides a reader through your poem, and form is also what guides us poets through the writing of the poem. So this is my current work towards that precision.
I do agree that things change in our continued performances and readings from our books, because the way we think of the work changes over time. But I still believe very much in that the precision of the poem. This is why I’ve gone back to form, to the music of the line, and why I’m paying more and more attention to punctuation, line break and stanza break.
yeah, good luck. i agree with what you posted about line breaks and enjambment, but i also agree with lee. still, readers won’t know anything about how you improv a piece on stage – and if the phrases don’t work on the page, they just don’t work.
i tried to go back and read your “for the city that nearly broke me poems” but couldn’t. are they published somewhere? and you mind me asking where you got the idea from?
dwayne
Hi Dwayne, Thanks.
You are right that the audience wouldn’t necessarily know if you are improvising a piece in performance. When I read from the books, I feel like I am in recitation mode. With the works in progress, I think more improv happens there, and this improv aids with editing, i.e. what did I write on the page, and why do I tend to speak it differently? Maybe the way I speak it should be the way I write it down. Admittedly, it isn’t always that clean a difference.
Re: The City That Nearly Broke Me series, I actually got the idea from a fellow poet, Rachelle Cruz, who posted that on her blog as a writing prompt given to her in workshop for the PEN Emerging Voices program, I think. Anyway, the whole prompt was to write a poem for the city that nearly broke you, and to write a poem for (if I remember correctly) the city that saved you. I liked the prompt because I really had to think deeper into my relationships with certain cities; Berkeley, SF, and Oakland have neither saved nor broken me. The city I shy away from writing is Manila, so that’s how I moved from the writing prompt into the poems.
Anyway, thanks for your interest in them. I’ve since taken many (most?) of them down because I’ve submitted them to 2-3 journals. If you are interested in going back and reading them, please back channel and I’d be happy to FW them to you in a PDF. bjanepr at gmail dot com.
Fair enough, Barb.
Hope all’s well up there. Unfortunately I’m going to miss Sasha’s reading this weekend, but I’m hoping to make it up for Oliver, Joseph, and Mari in September. Hi to O.