Craft notes 🔐: why not memorize sparrow-song?

Like last time, I wanted to share a bit more of my poetry-writing process. It's much easier to share than my prose-writing process, as these little poems are pretty short. Today, we're going to take a look at a draft of a poem penned on 21 April 2022, during a thirty minute writing sprint. I hope you find the differences between the first and final(ish) drafts compelling!

When I was quickly rereading the poem, I liked some of the images, but didn't really "get" what I was trying to describe until I looked at a note on the side of the draft, where I explained that it felt like I was wasting my life away researching chronic pain and endometriosis, and that little note was the compass that showed where to go next. Also there were a bunch of structural problems, so I had to fix those, and attempted something inspired by syllabic poetry. Let's dive in.

The following is free verse (almost every thing I write starts either in free verse or in prose verse) :

First draft

I am starting to memorize pointless numbers and
acronyms—when all I really want to do is
spend an entire spring to autumn,
watching the opening of the grapevines
that coat the buildings on my street—
I want to spend decades thinking
how to perfectly capture with poetry
that first perfect vanilla-spice smell
of a new book—or the way the drumming
of the ocean waves you used to listen
to as a child is still essential for
you to imagine every evening as you fall
asleep—I want to spend days, months,
learning sparrow song or walking
through the park for hours just watching
the passerby pass by—
but I instead I'm here debunking callous
marketing and really bad science
and wondering how many years of research
it will take before the solution is found.

There are a couple of things that stood out to me right away, the most evident is (what I am certain is) a completely accidental perspective shift from "I" to "you" about half-way through the poem. Another is my usual issue of too much description and imagery, so that has to be pared down.

Also, while "debunking callous marketing" has a really fun rhythm to it, I quickly decided that everything after the drumming ocean waves was going to get axed or respun.

Fixing the first issue, the perspective, was easy. I decided since the "you" had slipped in unconsciously, maybe that was a sign everything should be in that voice. "You" POVs in prose as in poems is accusatory, often hostile to the reader. So you either want to lean into that or counter it. The poem itself is not glittering or cheerful, so I think it works to use "you."

I tried a few different things with the poem's structure. At first, I thought about using indents. I then realized that most of my favourite lines were 8 or 9 syllables long, so I decided to experiment with a syllabic structure. Syllabic poetry is based on a consistent number of syllables in each line, and the accent on each line can land pretty much anywhere (Finch 2016).

[Syllabic poetry] is the main organizing principle of poetry in French, Italian, and other Romance languages. But in English, no well-known poet has used this system predominantly except Marianne Moore. (285)

I wanted the poem to feel like free-verse, so I aimed for each line to hit 8 or 9 syllables and did not care about stress. (I'm terrible at counting feet in a poem, so I might have missed the mark here and there, hence the flexible goal for counting.)

Also, I do love alliteration and just a little bit of repetition, so I tried to reach for it here and there.

The current (finalish) draft of the poem goes like this:

You thought you had decades to capture
how a fine book’s pages mature to
that perfect vanilla-spice, instead

You memorize dates and data, and
acronyms that shift between languages.

But all you really want is to spend
an entire spring to autumn watching
grapevines coat the old red row-houses

Or conjuring the drums, barrel-drums
of the south Atlantic bearing down
along uneven shores, every night
to try and simply sleep.

Only weapons: a poet’s myopic eyes
peering through biased studies or the
drama of patient advocacy groups—

Exchanging all those decades for a
flickering screen that holds no answers.

So, that's all for now. I was going to try to work on adding medial pauses and playing with the accents, but my first attempts were not very successful so I've decided to stop here. Also, I'm going to keep working on syllabic poetry in general, so if anyone has thoughts about syllabic poetry (or a favourite example of it in a non-Romance language!) do send it my way!

The quote above is sourced from my excessively marked-up copy of Anne Finch's very thorough A Poet's Craft (2016) from the University of Michigan Press.