English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

     Two a.m. on Friday night, a Florida winter was cold enough for me to be sitting outside with a sweatshirt and blanket, holding papers in a crease of the cloth to keep them from the wind. It was my thesis, it was poetry, and I was cursing every poet whose name came to mind, having, for the time, forgotten why I had any desire to so torture myself in the first place. If you had pushed me, I would have confessed. It was during my first poetry workshop, or rather, having caught the professor in a cordial mood, an independent study. I wrote my amateur poems and analyzed professionals' without making a connection between the two. Then one class, one poem, I saw something so simple: a line break had put an idea in my head with such force that I had attempted to argue it without realizing how it got there. I began to see the poem, then the book, as a construction, laid brick by brick around a maze of pipes and wiring; it was a house that, upon entering, one sees only the home, not the intricacies of its creation and purpose. After that, the harder realization: I could build these houses. What follows such profundity, if it is worth encompassing such a gross term, is hard labor. My thesis is only one example of a struggle, and the best by which to examine my writing process because I had to complete such an outrageous amount of material in what seemed such a short period of time. The nature of such driven work is to reveal to the writer what her process is, an understanding which allows her to speed up this process.

     The most difficult part for me was always beginning, so as a disciplinary measure I chose the earliest deadline to workshop the first attempts. I wrote, "write, Rachel, write," on the top of every page, and followed it with random details of my day, my surroundings, and simple memories of my childhood (reading these things, they would seem the words of a babbling drunk in the early hours of dawn). My first poems were moderate successes, enough to convince my peers that I was working, and had a sort of blueprint with which to work. Then came the dry spell, and over thirty poems in less than three months seemed impossible. In desperate efforts to create the new, I began scanning the babblings from the tops of the pages of those first poems, then the babblings made waiting for classes to begin, and the babblings written in notebooks late at night. I was searching for the materials I could use for my house, and while most of these things were worthless, I occasionally tripped over some memory, or an odd fact, and they began to appear as things useful to a poem, things reflected from deeper thoughts and truths. I condensed these things into a single notebook, highlighted details that related to each other, and clarified truths. Here was the basic framework for thirty interrelated poems.

     The next step was the actual building of a text from blank space. The first draft was the careless writing of half-formed ideas and uncertain themes, writing for the sake of printing on a page. I tossed in line breaks where it seemed the line should end, tried several half-thought adjectives before replacing them with the final one, and did these things with no certainty of where the beginning had been, or the end would be. In good times, I worked on three poems at once for an abundance of ideas, at other times I welcomed the intrusion of friends. As weeks passed, though, and I produced more and more with which to work, I did not so much ignore the interruptions as not notice them, and when I chanced to, it was not without struggling to take something worthwhile away. Inspiration, I found, was the result of such total immersion in a work that I could grasp what came simply because I was already there, pencil in hand, thoughts in the forefront of my mind, not waiting, but ready.

     On a poem by poem basis, these first revisions, though time consuming and producing plenty of waste, brought immediate gratification for two reasons: one, throwing away three quarters of something that had only taken twenty minutes to create was easy, and two, these first stages showed improvement at such a remarkable rate. Once establishing the poem I wanted, I could lay the pipes and wires, that is, decide such things as whether it required a form, if the analogies were congruent, what the pace of the poem should be, the diction level, and the perspective of its narrator. These things were also relatively easy, because they required no writing. The rewriting itself was a great deal more difficult; I once again had to create new, but the old was still fresh in my head and I had to fight, against convenience, not to go back to it. As for forms, well, I cursed the day rhyme was introduced into the English language, and accepted as a course that could be followed! I learned from some poems what would better others; recognizing the different strengths of poems, I could go back to other poems' weaknesses. I was learning from my own writing, and was amazed at the teaching skills I could benefit myself with.

     This constructing enforced habits I've not yet been able to shake. I would, for example, physically throw my notebooks (at walls, not people) when frustrated, walk away cursing, then return to the notebook, smooth its pages, and begin again with a peace-treaty sort of orientation. I established different notebooks for different moods, and selecting and opening them seemed to get me physically and mentally prepared for the voice I would attempt to enter. I realized I could type faster than write by hand, and the necessity for focus on details in poetry required me to write things out as a way of preventing the ease of rambling and idly chosen words and breaks. I was also unwilling to simply delete an incorrect phrase-each revision showed what I had been trying to do, and often the second was closer then the sixth. I kept many scraps of failures in my toolbox, knowing the potential they held for poems other than the ones they didn't fit into. I allowed myself to scribble on the tops of pages before I wrote, and often started an exciting idea on a new page, because blank pages frightened me, and I felt more secure if something was already there.

     Twenty-some poems later, I had a printable rough draft with enough structure to know it was time to create definite rooms. I was greatly relieved to find I had quite naturally been forming three types of poems, and arranged them in order. There was no denying it was time for revision on a greater scale. I had seen the ways my ideas linked together, and worked to strengthen the connections. These revisions were not only word by word and line by line, but also from a poem on page three to one on page seventeen. No longer was I throwing away whole stanzas, but adjusting single words, and single beats of rhythm. The work was time-consuming and unsatisfying, with change appearing slowly, and bringing no great triumph. It was like the slight leveling of a floor where inhabitants may not have noticed a leaning, but simply a discomfort in the room.

     As three months time came to a close, my thesis became a house, complete, and ready for an audience. I fumbled for titles and fought single words until the last hour passed. I presented my thesis, defended it, and, leaving the room, I finally realized what I had always heard writers say: the text may appear completed by a deadline or publication, but it is never done. Nonetheless, I stopped making nightly appearances wrapped in my blanket and sweatshirt (at least on Fridays). What I kept was the understanding of writing as work, as something to be immersed in so deeply that the torture becomes a bearable regularity, and that revision, for me, continues to be the long laborious hours and days that are the difference between the unfocused simplicity of a child's fort and a house that can be made a home.

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