The Secret of Writing: Revising Fiction and Poetry Journal Assignment: Poetry #3

The poem Attic Revelation starts out a garbled mess. The poem itself is inexplicable, using such archaic words as Minerva (who knows or cares who that is?), quiescent, twined, puissant and atavistic. He also uses trite language with the phrase "I learned too late." In addition, the poem suffers from adjectivitis. The poem seems to go on forever with the overuse of adjectives. These include anguished, tormented, darkened, quiescent, childish, dusty, puissant, atavistic, trembling, resuscitated, aging, inarticulate, unreconcilable, and suicidal. It almost seems like ever other word has an adjective attached too it.

By the first revision, there is at least an attempt made at a cohesive work. While there are specific images (oil-painted portrait, "tore it up and slapped me", "picture was a portrait of my dad who had killed himself three months before I had been born,") it still is difficult to read mainly because it seems overly verbose. We still have the problem from the last poem with misuse of allusions and mythology with Hermes replacing Minerva. There is also a problem with nautical metaphors (boatless winter lake, Titanic's broken hull,) that have no relevance whatsoever to the overall tone and content of the poem. If you strip away all the superfluous words, the poem itself is rather lifeless and dull.

By the second draft, the poem really comes alive. First of all, it reads like a story, not a poem where you need to spend hours trying to figure out the meaning. The use of adjectives has been greatly scaled back resulting in a poem that flows much better. This version also has much better clarity. The first sentence sets the stage and catches the reader's interest. The writing also provides information in a subtle manner. It isn't as blatent as the first revision, but by the same token it's not as garbled and confusing as the first version. Finally, adjectivitis is kept to a minimum. The flow of the poem is so much better when unnecessary words are removed. You still get the image the author is trying to convey, with burrowing through a lot of words that seem to be there just to take up space

Instructor Feedback
I am pretty obsessive about editing my own work. I work over and through it until there is nothing I haven't tested. And I can say it over and over, but I'll let this quote (can't remember the author's name) speak for me here: "I have rewritten--often several times--every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers."
--Gary