Anne Hopkinson loves to engage in the daily tussle with the English language. She writes a monthly column for the Burnaby NewsLeader and enjoys reading poetry at a variety of venues around the Lower Mainland. She is the apprentice of the Thursdays Writing Collective. She was kind enough to answer my questions about her editing process.
How would you characterize the process of revising your own work?
I confess to being interested in form poetry. I use three books: Norton Anthology of Poetic Form, In Fine Form, and The Ode Less Travelled. I am working my way through structured forms, writing a few poems of each. I take a free verse poem and write it as a sonnet or a villanelle, a pantoum or a ballad. Crazy, you say? Why do poetic gymnastics? Why tangle my mind with rhyme and restrictive structure? Why indeed. I’m not sure, but it feels really good. Somewhere in the process of learning a form, reading other poems in the form, and putting my original poem into that form I clarify the core of the poem. Often two poems develop, which together overburdened the original in ways I couldn’t identify, and apart are stronger.
Revision is inspiration or revision is hell?
So the revision is two things: a revision of the original poem, and an exploration of that same concept in another form. Of course there is great scope for change as the form leads me farther into or farther from the original. I discover and rediscover my poem’s nucleus and its recesses. I allow myself to go in any direction, and I allow myself time to select and run with choice phrases and surprises that appear.
Do you have three pet peeves when editing your own work or someone else’s.
Not exactly peeves. I’m particular about verbs. I search out compelling verbs, and will go to great lengths to find the right one. If a verb is weak or vague the poem suffers. So I diddle around with verbs, perhaps too long.
I try to read over my poems as someone else, a non-fiction friend, a poetry addict, a fisherman or neighbour. Role playing as reader and listener to a poem sometimes helps identify the snaggles. Sometimes I record myself and listen, or ask a friend to read it to me.
Which ideas, principles or gut feelings guided you through those changes?
I don’t keep many drafts of poems! Maybe I should. Here are three: one villanelle, one free verse, and one sonnet.
How Hope Flies like a Bird
Hope flies home from east to west,
the sun behind her warm and bright,
with dreams and promise in her breast.
Doubts and fears when once confessed
are left below in sudden flight,
as hope flies home from east to west.
She soars above the earthly test
of rocky peaks and towered heights,
with dreams and promise in her breast.
She’s not diverted, nor caressed
by golden glare or blinding light,
as hope flies home from east to west.
In voice, in song, our bird is blessed
with courage – read the words she writes,
the dreams and promise in her breast.
She flies a route he’d not suggest,
away before the cage is tight.
Hope flies home from east to west,
with dreams and promise in her breast.
The Varied Thrush
How hope flies from east to west,
the dips and swoops of mights and maybes
forgotten in her headlong flight.
She crashed into glass she knew was there,
knew inside,
was warned and forewarned,
but flew anyway
on the visions of possible futures
on the longing for possible joy.
Wings spread,
eyes wide in the reflected dawn,
she flew into the shine.
How Hope Flies like a Bird
How hope flies like a bird from east to west,
the sun behind her rising warm and bright,
with visions of the future in her breast,
the mights and maybes left behind in flight.
Imprinted instinct steers her beating wing,
forgotten are the hills and cliffs so high.
The man-made towers new heights and barriers bring
and shine in blazing glory in the sky.
But surely she will see the deadly glass,
and turn, uncaptured by its golden glare,
be warned and forewarned, lessons of the past
will save her from disaster waiting there.
Wings spread, eyes wide in the reflected dawn,
She flies into the shine, flies straight and strong.
Anne Hopkinson