Sandra Ridley

How do you work your way through revisions? Do you have any tricks or theories to removing commas, words or lines? Any special chairs or states of mind you like to work from?

Sandra Ridley: Drafts are set aside for weeks or months at a time. Notes on the flyleaves of books are erased. Old files are deleted and the waste bin fills with paper. Surely not the wisest method, but it’s how I work. With no tracery of evidence of where the poem was, it has more freedom of movement. For me, typically, drafts are pieced together from accumulated scraps. There’s often no real beginning. No end.

With revisions, it helps to keep the breath in mind. If the poem can’t find breath, if rhythm is suspect, I take out all the punctuation and condense the work into a long run-on sentence. Line-breaks, commas, periods and whatnots are then redistributed where pauses are needed most — weighted with hesitation. Pragmatism works. The breath dictates the words into the cadence and structure of the poem onto the page. And from the page back into the mouth.

Poetry needs to be read aloud, spoken, sung — but of course, there are exceptions like most visual and haptic, with emphasis on sight and touch.

A friend’s or editor’s eyes are always helpful.

How do you feel your editing process has changed from when you first started writing?

Sandra Ridley: It’s become more critical. These days what concerns me is cinching and culling too early in the writing process — removing words as quickly as they accumulate. That’s no way to write a poem. But if a draft can get past this stage, it’s exactly that, a draft. A rough poem. Hinterland it. The more detached I am when I reread it aloud, the better I can hear where the work is congested. The content and the words themselves. Is the poem’s truth clear? I don’t mean what is factually true, but what the poem is really about and how that can be said best — using the poem’s implicit vocabulary, partnered with its endemic emotion and sound.

With any luck, a poem insists itself — with an intention much different than our own. Open. Listen. Let go.

Robert Lowell wrote that “Revision is inspiration.” To what extent do you think that’s true? How would you rewrite Lowell: “Revision is __________”

Sandra Ridley: A tightening. A tourniquet.

I appreciate Lowell’s statement. Air into the lungs. Breath. But too often there is poor air quality. He got it only half-right. Mindful revision is inspiration. Revision itself is not.

Do you feel any difference or make any distinction between editing a single poem all by its lonesome and editing a series of poems for a collection? 

Most of my poems tend toward the serial and editing one affects the content and trajectory of the rest. One poem needs to be considered in the context of what comes before and after, particularly in serial work. Repeating images (or phrases) are okay until the objective eye sees that they can be read as infected with laziness. Also, individual poems taken from a serial often don’t retain the intensity of the whole, on their own. It’s a worry. So, I’ve been thinking about how to condense the serial’s integrity into excerpts. It’s a good thing we each have our heroes (and our agonists). We learn from them. These days I’m rereading Phil Hall’s An Oak Hunch and Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization (translated by Erín Moure and Robert Majzels). Here’s a section from Brossard’s:

the idea that there are
inconsolable centres
in the middle of the chest
while we keep on
coping
a notebook of roses
under the arm

To my ear, any excerpt of Brossard’s is full of the energy of her collection — vitality resonates. One piece sustains another.

Are there any lines from an early draft of a poem that you’d like to share? What ideas, principles or gut feelings guided you through those changes?

Sandra Ridley: Ah, you caught me just in time. For the last few weeks, I’ve been editing my manuscript, Post-Apothecary, which will be coming out this fall with Pedlar Press. I saved a revision from the prospering trash, with your question in mind. Here’s the last version of one poem:

Weaken : Swoon

Pull closer. The air is wet with skin in this spin-fevered room.
Tremble-heart flicker. A saccharine taste invites your tongue.
Pull closer. The air is wet with skin in this spin-fevered room.

Thin sepsis sliding on bed sheets. You, a gauntling, acquiesce.
Pull closer. The air is wet with skin in this spin-fevered room.
Thin sepsis sliding on bed sheets. You, a gauntling, acquiesce.

Insubstantial to the swift dreamscape, the rolling eye of night.
Thin sepsis sliding on bed sheets. You, a gauntling, acquiesce.
Insubstantial to the swift dreamscape, the rolling eye of night.

Glissando or gloaming : the threshold will swallow you whole.
Insubstantial to the swift dreamscape, the rolling eye of night.
Glissando or gloaming : the threshold will swallow you whole.

Tremble-heart flicker. A saccharine taste invites your tongue.
Pull closer. The air is wet with skin in this spin-fevered room.
Tremble-heart flicker. A saccharine taste invites your tongue.

*

A tourniquet is needed, certainly. First, my reference to spin is redundant. The lines reel on their own, but go nowhere. So I got rid of spin. I got rid of fever too because wasn’t that the state I wanted the poem to evoke? I didn’t need to specifically name it. Then a close friend pointed out the obvious. My god. Tremble-heart flicker? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s in there? Nauseating. Then, what saccharine taste? Of what? Sepsis? Seriously? Sepsis in a poem? Good bye, both of them.

The poem ate itself away.

Today:

Pull closer. This air, wet with skin in your calla lilied room.
On a catafalque of creased sheets, you, gauntling —
acquiesce.

Insubstantial in this dreamscape, this rolling eye of night.
Its gloaming shrouds you whole

Calla lilied replaced spin-fevered. Thin sepsis sliding on bed sheets became catafalque on creased sheets (catafalque supplied by the same close friend), carrying the C sound. Bed isn’t as hard-working as creased and with catafalque the idea of bed is connoted. Glissando was cut because what was it doing there in the first place? What function did it serve? Absolutely none, other than carrying the ‘G’, which gloaming was already burdened with. Without references to saccharine taste or tongue, a threshold that swallows becomes completely nonsensical. No more aspects of the mouth. And isn’t a dreamscape a kind of threshold? As is gloaming? There’s another redundancy. So, threshold — gone! And since swallows was excised, what would replace it? Shrouds. Similar darkening action, stitched to the funereal. I may have been wanting the poem to be about fever, but the poem insisted on death.

Better? (Maybe.)

Done? (Ask me in a few weeks.)

Oh Valery.

OK, I’m throwing out that earlier version now. Thanks for the questions.