What is Revision?

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来自 California Institute of the Arts 的课程

释放想象力：诗歌工作室

660 个评分

California Institute of the Arts

释放想象力：诗歌工作室

660 个评分

Why just write poems when you can write better ones? This course is built on the notion that the most exciting writing begins after the first draft. It is specifically for folks who believe that writing poems just to express oneself is like using the Internet just for email. After all, poetry can change the way you and your readers think of the world and its inhabitants; it can break new ground for language; turn a blank sheet of paper into a teeming concert of voices and music. Though any of us may have the potential to make that happen, having an understanding of how several tools of poetic composition can be used (and audaciously “mis-used”) gives you more ways to try (and if we do this right, we might surprise ourselves most of all). We'll cover key poetic terms and devices by studying poems by a handful of modern and contemporary poets and then get a chance to try our own hand at writing new poem drafts from a select number of prompts. Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to workshop your poem drafts and get feedback on your work, working towards a more polished poem.

从本节课中

Sharpened Poetry: Revision Strategies

When you revise a poem, you are not trying to dull the emotional flash of your first draft. You must, instead, intensify it. In this, our final week, we’ll discuss the difference between revision and editing, the art of reading your own work critically, and the beauty of drafts. For your final peer review, you’ll turn in (and in turn, assess) a revision of one of the poems from the preceding 5 modules.

Introduction1:02

What is Revision?3:16

Where Do I Start Revising?2:31

How Do I Start Revising a Poem I’ve Written in Form?3:26

How do I Incorporate Workshop Feedback Into the Revision Process?4:14

与讲师见面

Douglas Kearney
Faculty, MFA in Writing Program
Critical Studies

Revision is different from editing.

Editing is like a sweet spot.

Editing is when you're up at three in the morning, and there's an em dash, and

you're trying to decide if it should be an em dash or a semicolon,

and you're going back and forth; that's joy,

that's pleasure.

That's when you're looking at two words: do I mean blue, or do I mean azure?

That's editing.

Right?

But revision is also exciting.

Revision is when you look at what a draft of a poem gives you,

and you begin to think, well where else could this poem go?

Let's say you've written this poem about love.

Right, that old abstraction, but

let's say somewhere in that poem something else begins to creep its way in,

after all of the, "And you're so...", and, "I miss you!" and

all of that, you see a line in there about weather as in rain,

or thunder, a blizzard.

And suddenly, you get this surprise in your own poem,

that this poem that you thought was just the list of the qualities of somebody who

amazes you, suddenly has something to do with weather.

And now with revision, you're seeing the poem completely new.

You're seeing it again.

But kind of like you're seeing it for the first time.

And so now when you're working on the poem,

you have that whole other thing that you can work with: love and weather.

And you can begin turning the poem to take advantage of this really cool idea

that you didn't expect when you first sat down to start writing it.

That's what revision is.

It's like cultivating the ability to read your poem through someone else's eyes.

And that's what all these tools we've been talking about allow you to do.

When you're not just thinking about the poem as a confession of your feelings, or

an expression of some emotion, or even a prolonged argument with an idea.

But you can begin thinking about it as this convergence of sound, pattern,

figures of speech, line breaks, rhythm.

You can come outside of your poem, and see it from a different angle.

Sometimes, those different angles

are exactly where the poem needed to go in the first place,

and you just needed a draft to begin unlocking it. I'll tell you,

I've had revision for

poems where I've actually thrown away 75% of the poem, because what I

realized was that what I really needed to say was located right up at the top.

And then the remainder of the poem becomes new writing,

taking advantage of that thing, that surprise.

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