Drafting a Poem

a post on poetic process where I allow a peek into my poetry notebook that I guard with my life and never EVER let anyone see!

Recently I had the honor of my poem “Communion Ghazal” being published in Ekstasis Magazine’s spring collection and thought I’d share with you my early drafts:

First, I’d like to say that I did actually fail (an F, not “Needs Improvement”) handwriting in school, and my handwriting is particularly bad when writing poetry, but, if you can make it out, you can see a little bit of how I decided to engage with the ghazal form.

I read recently that traditional ghazals were often about drinking wine, and I thought that sounds fun, I’ll do a take on that.

My first title was “Drunken Ghazal” (*not condoning drunkenness to be sure, but in reference more to the idea of alcohol used in food, like “drunken chicken” — this is a draft, so I ask no forgiveness!), but as I began to write, I noticed my themes were centering a bit more on communion, especially toward the end.

Since a ghazal works as couplets (strung together like pearls), there’s a lot of possibility for rearrangement, as you can see in my drafts, where I numbered them as I thought they might best impact the final couplet. I also found it helpful to keep a running list of ideas of how to include the wine and rhymes (upper left hand corner).

I like to draft by hand—much easier to move things about and to see it all, no deleting but only scribbling out mistakes.

This month, as I’m tackling revisions, I’ve decided to rewrite by hand poems that I had previously typed up as finished, and to put them back into my notebook to “Redraft” them.

To me this feels like making a quilt then going back and taking out all the stitches, but the pieces are all (mostly) there. It gives me the room to make the poem a mess again, then reconstruct it. I am hoping to get some better drafts of poems that I’d like to see taken a step further.

So how do you draft your poems? Any tips / advice on revision?

(if there’s something you can’t quite make out in my handwriting, and would like clarification, let me know in the comments!)