Herbert was at it again before dawn, that old curmudgeon who tries to live rent free in my head and critiques everything I write. (He never likes any of my poems.)
Stanley, my scheduler, stepped between us and told me to go to the gym before Word Raccoon got involved. We rowed, and I came home less frantic and ready for porch writing, even if it started out overcast and chilly.
Now the sun beams like it’s proud of itself except when it shyly hides. The trees are in gentle evermotion, and small red buds burst from the branches.
A squirrel squeaks nearby. Perhaps the birbs will join us, too, sometime?
(Purple prose? Perhaps. I’m too happy to care. My eyes are full again.)
You need a True North for knowing how to revise your writing. Not someone whose work you imitate (that’s the anxiety of influence; see Harold Bloom) but a lens that quietly recalibrates your own. If you drift too far into the maze, just asking yourself what they would notice brings you back, not to their voice, but to a sharper version of yours.
Lately I’ve been trying to name and interrogate that lens that I know betters my writing as I see it:
Less heat. More precision.
When I manage it, I see the maturity in it. The elegance. The small diamond resting on black velvet. A frame that highlights instead of overwhelms.
But then Word Raccoon starts tossing the pillows off the sofa and pulling out her markers. She wants pastels. Glitter. She wants to gather all the violets in the yard and gather them into a tiny pink perfume bottle.
She doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be embarrassed by her sparkle, or if that sparkle is simply part of her ecosystem. Nature does not apologize for being garish. Gemstones. Tropical fish. Flowers. Who is going to tell nature to give it a rest? Not me.
I am, for better or worse, a poet now. I feel in Hollywood-sign sized letters and I sometimes write the same.
I regret nothing.
And still, I admire the diamond. I admire restraint. I admire the clarity of it.
But what of “Less heat. More precision?”
Just how much heat can precision hold without burning the reader, and how much precision can heat handle without warping?
That’s what I aim to find out. It may mean looking at some bent poems, some tortured prose, but there are worse things in life. And what if something gorgeous comes from the intertwining? Did you think of that, Herbert?
With WR purring with happiness to be back on the porch, I revised the poems I wrote over the weekend, both “Interrogating Legacy in a Hotel Room before Dawn,” and the second which became “Walking the Galleries,” a quiet meditation on observing someone in an art gallery. A third came to me: “Cameras Capture, Too.”
Since the first two are a pair, and the third perhaps leans into them, I called them a trio and gave them a too-obvious working title if they want to hang out together: Curation. They quickly found relatives in my poem files.
Finally, I’m excited to report that Amaranth Journal has chosen two of my food poems for publication, “Well Fed” and “Staying Steady” for their summer issue, so stay tuned for that.
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