Poem as Process, Not Product

The excellence found in alignment—an expansive approach to poem making

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash

On Tuesday, I kicked off the second session of a new workshop format I piloted this winter called (Re)visionary Workshop. I developed the class in response to student comments over the years along the lines of: “The feedback was so helpful, but I was completely blown away by this particular exercise that aligned me with the poem’s possibilities in a new way.” 

How I was taught to workshop poems twenty years ago isn’t how I teach now. In the old workshop model, the instructor’s opinion mattered above all else. Students were expected to shape poems to fit a certain aesthetic, maybe one championed by the instructor or else found in literary journals. 

The poem became an object scrutinized for its function, how well it might produce desired outcomes—mainly, some form of praise. I know I’m making products of my poems when the harsh inner dialog starts up: Is the poem worthy of X? Is it good enough? It’s terrible. It’s brilliant. No, it’s awful.

The problem with approaching poems as products

A product is “an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale.” It is defined by its utility. Needless to say, treating poems as products is stifling. 

I don’t think my MFA program was at fault. It was an unfortunate side-effect of writing in an institutional setting—one built to produce and measure “excellence.” Also, it’s a side-effect of writing in a culture of commodification. The product-outcome approach is just an extension of those systems. 

You and I know: Poetry is not a product. It is a process. 

One way to describe a poem is as a process that happens in the mind-body of the poet and reader. Poems’ language ignites a chain reaction that continues in us well beyond our initial writing/reading. A poem is an ongoing experience.

Poem as exchange, exchange as creation

Consider poet Muriel Rukeyser’s thoughts (from essays collected in Life of Poetry).

I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world … all are here, in a music like the music of our time … and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.

A poem moves through its sounds set in motion, and the reaction to these sounds, their rhymes and repetitions and contrast, has a demonstrable physical basis which can be traced…

The impact of the images, and the tension and attraction between meanings … to recognize the energies that are transferred between people when a poem is given and taken … 

In the exchange [of poetry], the human energy that is transferred is to be considered. Exchange is creation; and the human energy involved is consciousness, the capacity to produce change from existing conditions.

Reframing excellence

So, if poems aren’t products, if they are processes that could be boundless, how do we know when a poem has reached its full potential? What is excellence?

The poem is always reaching for an unreachable state of perfection, suggests Ocean Vuong in a recent LitHub essay (thank you, Celeste!): 

“It’s never done. If I had a chance now with every book I wrote, every page would be a little different. Commas would be moved, words. And I think that’s beautiful, actually. That’s a good thing. It reminds us that the artist and the mind and the poem still grow. The poem is like a tree, and the book is a photograph of the tree. You take a photograph of the tree, but the next day, the tree has new cells. The next year, it has new branches. We have to make peace with the fact that a book is actually just a photo album, and that the organic psychic life of the poem is already growing somewhere else, somewhere inside you. And we pin it down ….”

And, reflecting on John Berryman’s process, which involved typing out the poem draft and meditating on it for days without making any revisions:

What happens is that there are so many edits that come, that [Berryman] just doesn’t do. The idea is to not do it. And then, by the third day, the edits that survive the mind hovering over them are the ones that — you slip [the draft] out of the glassine and make them right away … It shows that there is so much work that could be done when we meditate on a poem, rather than constantly putting pen to paper, marking things up because it seems very productive. In fact, so much of creation is thinking.

For Berryman, for Vuong, for Rukeyser, one gets the sense that excellence is something other than a judgement made by some authority comparing like objects. The excellence they reach for is one of deep alignment with the nature of language and the human experience itself. 

Reframing poem making in this way doesn’t mean we slack off. Quite the opposite. It underscores how we must do the work—diligently, with focus, consistently, over time—to cultivate each individual poem’s excellence. Every poet must develop their own sense of each poem’s potential. 

That, I think, is the point of workshop—to deepen our process and our alignment. Not to find out what is “good.”

How do you stay aligned with process? How do you define excellence for yourself?