Beauty In The Mess

When I write, I usually tend to type the whole thing up on my laptop, and then make passes over the same document to edit. As a result, I am not in the habit of keeping my rough drafts. For this prompt I thought, where's something where I've left behind evidence of the process itself , both the beauty- the final product- and the mess that final product wouldn't exist without? One is not possible without the other, but it took some searching to find evidence of the latter anywhere.

Ultimately it was poetry that saved me.

My poetry process is very different from when I write a short story or novel. Poetry is the only thing I like to write out on paper before I take it to the screen. As a result, I have notebooks upon notebooks full of chaotic scribbles, some of which I eventually turn into poems, and some of which don’t go anywhere at all.

I've talked at length about my relationship with poetry here and how it came to be so special and central to my life. I even talked a little there about HOW I like to write and rewrite my poetry, but here I'll do a deeper dive, and use one of the longest poems I've written as an example.

"A Different Kind of Drowning" was originally written as a submission for an ekphrastic challenge in the lit mag Rattle, which hosts one of these every month. This was the February 2021 challenge, and the picture we were to base the poem on was "Cloud Dance" by Claire Ibarra (highly recommend checking out her site behind the link!) Immediately, this beautiful, enchanted picture (shown as the titular image for this post) made me think of the photos my father would take in August when we went to the camp we rented every year in Maine growing up.

Branch Lake has a long history with my family. My mother spent most of her childhood there growing up, and her parents continued to live there half the year throughout my childhood. We would visit every single year for a month in summer from the time I was a baby. When my mom passed away in 2012, we needed camp more than ever, but it was also a challenging place to return to. This poem came out of that. It is a poem about memory, and about the never-ending process of grief.

The finished, printed product:

My poetry process is haphazard to say the least, particularly with longer poems. I will sit and pour out whatever is in my head- sometimes it's only a line I like, and other times it's a stanza or two, fully formed. This time, the whole poem did not come out at once. What follows are some pictures of my original notes. I’ve marked certain bits with numbers and footnoted them below.

1. On the first page I shared, you can see I wrote “Ekphrasis Feb. notes”. Sometimes bits of different poems in progress end up next to each other on adjacent pages in my notebook, so I'll label the top if it's a different poem that what came before consecutively. Here you can see a bit of brainstorming- my thoughts on the art and what it reminded me of. You can see "ekphrasis (cont.) on a later page because I likely worked on this poem on more than one occasion and there was other stuff in between in my notebook.

2. As happens sometimes, the very last lines and image in the poem came to me first and kind of drove the direction and tone- I wrote towards that ending throughout. The seamless interchange of water and sky in the source photo and this image of walking into them both and letting go like a type of baptism after unspeakable loss was a very strong and persistent image for me, and spoke to me of an emotion I still can't name (and that's the purpose of poetry for me anyway, conveying the unspeakable!) I walked towards this ultimate image throughout, drawing on my memories of camp, particularly in the few years right after my mom's passing.

3. I usually use the * symbol when connecting one fragment to another that I wrote earlier, either to signify I want it to come before or after in the final poem. Here you can see it connecting two chunks in this way. I always get a feeling of elation when this happens when I'm drafting, like the form of the beast is finally pulling together.

4. Scribbled out fragments are, self-explanatorily, things I decided didn't go or wasn't feeling at the moment. Sometimes the decision to strike something out comes as I'm writing/just as I finish it, and sometimes it comes much later when I'm looking over the poem to type it up. The 'strike-outs' here are not very accurate, as I ended up using a lot of what I slashed after all- and this is why I don’t obscure the words with thicker marks. They are not final decisions. You can see at least one bit that I slashed and left removed- the part about the diving rock on page 3. I must really not have been feeling this direction because of the “< eh? …” I’ve eloquently inscribed here lmao.

5. The circle I made around walking to visit the ghosts was for emphasis- CONTINUE in this direction. What about the ghosts? Expand. This was indeed a really good direction to go in the end for this poem.

6. In some places you can see where I've exchanged one word for another, i.e. species/different kind, Maine/the lake. Again, I write it this way instead of obscuring the original word to keep my options open when I revisit!

7. In some places, I write whole chunks down that pretty much stay together in the final poem, but at other times you can see little bits of imagery or standalone lines thrown out on the page, like this one. These are usually things that come to me in isolated blips, little bursts of language that I like so much I know I'm adding it somewhere in the final cut, if not where.

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Once I’ve worked in this stream-of-consciousness way for a while and I feel I have a complete poem on the page, I retreat for a bit. I like to wait at least a day between finishing the rough draft of a poem and typing it up. I feel like it gives me an edge to come back after that little bit of separation, similar to how I take even longer breaks after writing a novel to come back with fresh eyes.

The typing-up process is where I finally lay things out in a kind of cohesive order. First I'll dictate anything I've written onto the page into Scrivener or Word. I don't worry too much about line breaks or stanzas when I do this. If it's not intuitive, I wait until I've finished simply transferring everything from handwriting to typing. Once that's done, I play with the format. I'll move some lines around, delete some things that aren't working for me and add some more where I feel it's needed. At this point, the poem is pretty alive in my head, and I'm feeling so 'inside' of it that filling in the blanks like this is a lot of fun. If you see things in the final version that aren't in my original notes at all, they were added when I played around with the typed version!

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I've always struggled with perfectionism to the point where it renders me immobile if I let it (ironically). Looking back at my process in this way is something I don't often do and has helped to remind me that very rarely does anything spring perfectly formed from the page. In order to get to the mythical possibility your mind has conceived, you have to surrender to a bit of chaos, get lost in the mess for a while. You have to get your hands dirty, to immerse yourself in memory or to feel all the feelings.

I personally get very inspired by reading about other writers' processes, and I hope this does the same for you- or at the very least that it was interesting to see. Art also has the ability to take our most painful moments and turn them into something beautiful. It can be a form of therapy to write about any type of pain or loss and the feelings it engenders. In doing this, we help ourselves make sense of things.

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams