How to Make a Poem That Lasts
On Revising “Revelry,” 13 Years Later
If I had known, when I promised to write a poem for Cincinnati’s Sitwells Café, how many revisions it would go through and how long it would take, I might have thought better of the offer. My friend Lisa Storey, the owner of Sitwells, had been dislodged unceremoniously from her previous building by the landlord, and I was trying to give her moral support for the move to a new café space. After all, as I was in the habit of reminding my poetry students at Miami University, poetry deserves a place in public and private life, not just on the bookshelves of other poets. And now, here I was, being offered a convenient chance to put my pen where my mouth was, right in the middle of one of the city’s hippest artistic hangouts.
Actually, “around the edges” would be a more accurate prepositional phrase than “right in the middle,” because as soon as we decided that I would write the poem, Lisa had the bright idea of painting it around the ceiling of the new café space. No wonder that I ended up putting it through over 40 substantial drafts before it was finished. My aim was to write something that would be simple enough to be appreciated at first glance by someone walking into the café for the first time, and complex and rich enough that a hard-core Sitwells regular (“Sitwellians,” they were called) could read it hundreds of times without getting bored, glancing up during deep pauses in conversation, from one of Sitwells’ funky old school desks or the green-tiled round garden table. I wanted it to be intriguing enough to live up to the writing of the café’s namesake, Edith Sitwell, and the strange ghostly Edith Sitwell doll crafted by artist Lisa Siders for the small shelf over the counter. And it had to be short enough to fit in the space around the perimeter of the ceiling that Lisa (Storey) referred to as the “ ceiling sofit,” in letters painted large enough to read from below.
My drafts show that I started with a warm-up Sitwells poem a few weeks after speaking with Lisa, in September. It wasn’t good enough to revise. Then on a cold November day I went to work in earnest, sitting in the new café for inspiration. Since I had no ideas at all, other than the conviction that Sitwells is a great café, I began in idle free-association, hoping something would catch. The first drafts, most of them crossed out, are scrawled on the back of a fluorescent orange Sitwells poetry slam flyer. But I already had a sense of the music I wanted the poem to have. Only the tetrameter rhythm links the very first drafts with the final version . . .
oh, yes, and one other thing. In the upper right hand corner of one initial draft is a list of the rhyme-words from Shakespeare’s cynical attack on the consequences of physical passion, Sonnet 129: “shame,” “lust,” “extreme,” “trust,” “straight”. . . As a young poet drinking too-expensive lattes in San Francisco, I had read this beautiful, skillful sonnet over and over. It was painted in the archway of a North Beach café, the only poem I had ever seen painted on an eatery wall. And after reading it so often, I began to realize that I disliked it — not so much for its style as for its theme (I am a Wiccan, and part of my faith is to understand physical pleasure as a gift from the Goddess).
So today, hunched over my nicked wooden table from the deeply indented cushion of one of a pair of linked vintage red-velvet theater seats, panicking over how I was ever going to write a poem strong enough for Sitwells’ ceiling, I started doodling down the rhyme-words off of that long-ago calligraphied café wall and got an idea for my poem’s focus at last. I would write a poem that celebrated the power and beauty of “lust” rather than its destructiveness — an anti- Sonnet-129 poem for the life-loving denizens of Sitwells. I don’t know if I actually ended up doing this. I merely followed the revision process, which carried me through the poem in its own way. I do know, though, that one word from that original rhyme-list — “lust” — survived into the final version of the poem.
Even though I was beginning to zero in on a general theme for my ceiling decoration, I didn’t move into the logical left side of my brain too soon. Instead I continued to play for several more drafts, letting out plenty of kite string, letting the words flit where they wanted to go. I wanted my poem to be not only “accessible” to the businesspeople and other non-literary types who often lunched at Sitwells, but also “experimental” enough in style and syntax to speak to the sophisticated avant-garde art student crowd who frequented it into the wee hours. So I didn’t want it to be didactic or forced; I wanted the words to float to the surface of the poem of their own accord.
At home, I printed out successive drafts at my computer and dragged their electronic versions into the trash, then curled up with a pen to write revisions on the hard copies. I do this to save disk space and confusion and also to preserve the drafts in their actual state, resisting the temptation to tinker and improve them, in case I will want to use something from the early versions later (as a result, I’ve had to retype selected old drafts for the purpose of this, luckily highly unusual, essay). After two months and fifteen drafts of playing with words (the next dated version is from January), I had come up with this:
This is the war that wills aloud,
in voices hushed or caved or wrung
out of the rack that sweetness hung
here for the measure of this crowd.
Profiles rock poised air. The proud
lips listen, voices feel. Eyes thrill
alive with words that blend their fill
seasoned through table, rung, or cloud.
Words pour and parry, spiral, among
the single and paired and multiple,
into the cups that will not spill.
Drink in the warmth that marks the tongue
that has been spoken here, and sung.
I don’t know where the idea of war came from — whether it had to do more with the edgy cultural vibrancy of Sitwells or my own internal dialogue with my Elizabethan precursor — but I recall the feeling that that was the only way I could start the poem. And I find it interesting that not only had I excised all of Shakespeare’s rhyme words at this point; I had also turned the poem into a sonnet, albeit one keeping the zesty, energetic tetrameter rhythm that had come to me with the first free-associations and which felt so appropriate for Sitwells. But already the poem is declaring some independence from the battle, by using an original hybrid sonnet form, abbaaccadeedd instead of the Shakespearean sonnet pattern ababcdcdefefgg.
I liked the last third of the poem best, but the form seemed too stilted and closed for the energy I wanted to create, the metaphors and imagery too obscure, veering too far towards the literary, artsy end of the audience spectrum. I needed it to be more concrete and accessible. Perhaps because I felt a shorter, more punchy shape would put me in closer touch with that concreteness, I would soon abandon the sonnet form for this project. First it would serve its purpose, providing a capacious scaffolding within which I built the imagery that would eventually shape the poem: lips, words, voices, tables, cups, tongues.
Though only a few words from this stage (“rung,” “alive,” “cup,” “cloud”) will survive into the final draft, the diction overall is already simple, mostly monosyllabic, creating the urgent warm rhythm I also hear in parts of the final version. The disyllabic words tend to be trochaic (sweetness, measure, seasoned, parry, spiral, spoken), with the falling rhythm lending a slightly elegiac mood that would also characterize the final version of the poem. The double meaning of a “tongue” as a special language spoken at Sitwells would last for quite a few drafts, but in the final version it would seem redundant; my hope was that the poem itself would exemplify such a “tongue,” which would no longer need to be referred to explicitly.
Many drafts and a month later, by the end of February, more of the language and imagery of the final version had emerged and the rhythm had become even more of a falling rhythm, with trochees at the beginnings of more lines:
This is the hour that breathes aloud
over the mouths that slip and sing
where a new culture galloping
bends alive around cup and cloud.
Deep in this landscape that the dark
warms, and the morning light lets go,
chairs root and rung their hearts with snow,
curtains are velvet thick, like bark.
Blood warms the lips and moves the skin;
voices find hours to revel in.
In words all hushed or caved or wrung,
here for the measure of this crowd,
I drink in the warmth that marks the tongue
that has been spoken here, and sung.
Though it seems as if concrete imagery should logically appear first as a poem emerges, since it presents itself first to the senses, looking over this draft makes me understand that for me a poem can happen the opposite way: imagery can emerge with greater and greater definition out of a complex of feelings and thoughts. So, here, through a kind of cycling through of felt impressions of the feeling, mood, and meaning of the café, the concrete imagery of the chairs, curtains and lips is beginning to solidify. These solid images were those I seized on and carried into later drafts. The tone of the poem was also becoming more direct and intimate — perhaps going too far in that direction and beginning to seem too soft, too easy — but tone was not my main concern at this point. I was still trying to find the imagistic spine of the poem, and I knew the exact balance of tone was likely to fall into place after that.
At this point, the poem had gone back and forth several times between quatrains and a sonnet-like block of text. This variation on the sonnet rhyme scheme would be the last. For the poem’s next incarnation, I made a definitive move into stanzas. I think this rejection of the sonnet form — partly spurred by the sense that a single bock of text was too “literary” a shape for the broad audience I wanted to be able to enjoy the poem — was the moment that the poem began to have its own identity, its birth if you will; perhaps that is why, at this point, the poem has a title for the first time. Instead of the sonnet, I used an alternative form, a kind of “prayer,” picking up on the hopeful idea of a “new culture” being birthed in the long conversations held nightly and daily over the tables of Sitwells. As appropriate in a public prayer, at this point I began to use the first person plural voice, the “our” that appears in the final version, rather than the “I” of the earlier drafts.
The genre of the prayer led to another breakthrough as well: Around the middle of the next dozen (undated) drafts, where the poem has a title for the first time, the poem is temporarily back in a block form, but the sonnet rhyme scheme is gone, and an italicized couplet, like an utterance, has appeared in the middle of the poem:
A Prayer for Sitwells Café
Voices believe words and move free;
lust fills our lips; blood moves our skin.
Open our mouths to sip and sing.
Chairs root. Their hearts are runged with snow,
the curtains grow velvet thick, like bark.
Bend us alive around cup and cloud
through a new culture, galloping.
Passion is only revelry;
these are the hours to revel in.
Deep in this landscape ringed with dark,
warm us with the morning we let go.
This is the hour to breathe aloud,
to drink like the warmth of a learning tongue,
spoken and speaking, singing, sung.
As the poem gathered momentum and began to move towards its final shape, I tried repeating this italicized couplet as a refrain at the end of each stanza:
A Prayer for Sitwells Café
Voices believe words and move free;
lust fills our lips; blood moves our skin.
Passion is only revelry;
these are the hours to revel in.
Chairs root. Their hearts are runged with snow,
the curtains grow velvet thick, like bark.
Bend us alive around cup and cloud
through a new culture, galloping.
Passion is only revelry;
these are the hours to revel in.
Deep in this landscape ringed with dark,
warm us with the morning we let go.
This is the hour to breathe aloud.
Passion is only revelry;
these are the hours to revel in.
Open our mouths to sip and sing.
Drink like the warmth of a learning tongue,
spoken and speaking, singing, sung.
I have found that giving myself permission to write a bad draft, to play without fear of embarrassment, can help free a poem into its finished state. In this case, the repeating refrains were far too corny for the poem (not to mention that they would take up too much space around the ceiling), and they lasted for only a couple of drafts. But they helped bring the poem to its final structure, by isolating into the refrain the two lines that would become the last lines of the final version’s two stanzas.
As I began to hone in on the shape of the poem, I shortened it to eight lines, retitled it “Revelry,” and added the question at the end of the first stanza to give it more of a dramatic plot. I cut out the hard-to-visualize “galloping culture” and moved “ringed landscape” nearer to “runged with snow,” where consonance could create its magnetic field. The alliterating “lips” and “lust” had already found their way back in from an earlier draft, bringing the poem to root in the Shakespeare sonnet that had been part of its inception so many months earlier. The eight lines had the edge of simplicity and openness I wanted for the lunch-time crowd, but maintained surprise and mystery for the after-midnight crowd. Most crucially, the words felt as if they spoke to me, not from me. The poem was finished.
Lisa, true to her inspiration, had “Revelry” painted in artful lettering around the Sitwells ceiling by a young artist named Turtle. In exchange for my efforts, I was appointed Poet Laureate of Sitwells — a lifelong, unpaid office. The poem is still painted there today, some words red and some green, on a creamy background that darkened disturbingly during the three years before Sitwells finally went smoke-free. I haven’t seen the painted version since moving away to Maine over two years ago, but I am prouder of it than of most other publications. And, though I am in the habit of marking up poems that appear in journals or even books with post-publication revisions, my patience in revising “Revelry” has been rewarded; luckily, I haven’t felt the need to change a word.
Annie Finch
August, 2006
REVELRY
Chairs root. Their hearts are runged with snow.
Curtains grow velvet thick, like bark,
in this warm landscape ringed with dark.
Is passion only revelry?
Voices believe words and move free;
lust fills our lips; blood moves our skin.
We bend alive around cup and cloud.
These are the hours to revel in.
PS Since finishing this essay, I finally put “Revelry” into my new poetry manuscript, and there, I did end up revising it once more. I changed the first line to “Chairs root, their tables runged with snow,” and removed “the” before “hours” in the last line. My guess is that, now, it really is finished. . .
NOTE January 23, 2019 This essay has been published in American Poet and in the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press). I publish it now on Medium to celebrate the sale of Sitwells to new owners who renovated the cafe this year. I have moved again, to Washington D.C., and haven’t seen the poem in many years— but I was happy to see from photos that it has survived the renovation. You can see a video of me reading the poem, and video of the poem in situ at Sitwells, on Youtube — AF
Annie Finch is a poet, speaker, writer, teacher, and performer who offers spellbinding readings of poetry infused with magic. Her poetry has appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in Poetry, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dr. Finch earned her Ph.D from Stanford University and traces her descent from Celtic bards, Norse volurs, and accused witches imprisoned in Salem. Author of books and essays on poetry, meter, feminism, abortion, and witchcraft, she speaks and performs widely.
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