For undergraduate poetry workshops, students often put words to page in Word or Google Docs. This usually means revision consists of overwriting, cutting and pasting, adding and/or subtracting. The jump from first draft to final version is done with no record of the incremental changes that came between. How many of us have been working this way and thought, “What was it I wrote before? I want to use it, but I can’t remember exactly what it was.” A lot of useful writing can be lost. Teaching students to use structured revision practices can help them develop the crafting skills of poetry.
A good poem for a revision exercise is Sylvia Plath’s “Stings.” Her additions, removals, and rearrangings are noted on each of her several drafts. Other poems with available drafts include Plath’s “Ariel,” Ginsburg’s “Howl,” Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of Booker T,” and Larry Levis’s “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate.”
For this exercise, students can work alone or in pairs. Give each student a copy of the published version of “Stings” and a copy of one of the working drafts. Her first few drafts were written by hand (numbered 1, 2, 3 in the upper right-hand corner). Then she created typed drafts with handwritten notes. (One particularly interesting version has two sections of the poem attached by gluing one piece of paper to another.) Have the students note what changes Plath made between the working draft and the published version. Beginning with the person or pair with draft #1, have them present their findings to the class in the order the drafts were created. Discuss why they think Plath made the changes and choices she did. Ask if they agree with those changes or what they may have done differently. You could follow this exercise with an exercise in which your students bring drafts of their own poems to discuss their process and craft choices.
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Ann Hart is a poet and graduate student in creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. Her work can be found at Rattle Poets Respond, FewerThan500, C-U Haiku, Silver Birch Press, and in the anthology Tomato Slices. She was the 2016 winner of CUMTD Poets on the Bus with her poem “These Eight Short Lines.”