Squeezing the Excess Out of a Poem

Writer: Kenneth Chamlee

In writing a poem about personal experience, the first draft often weighs in like an overpacked suitcase, full of items we think we’ll need for the trip. We lay out sensory detail, setting and backstory, fold and place other people, and often, a conclusion or aftermath. All of this belongs in the original notes, the impulse scribbling, and it is good to have a full bucket before drawing out the pebbles that will serve. Poets choose these details for authenticity, thinking a poem must be true to what happened and honest to its history or context, particularly a poem with a narrative arc. It’s okay to write fat first drafts to get a poem started, so don’t worry about those deep-fried lines or the extra cheese. You’ll cut them later.

Experience: What happened, and everything that comes with it 

But poems are not journalism or strict autobiography and have no need to be comprehensive. You might begin a poem with a full catalog of experience, but excess tends to obscure essence. A poem is a compression, not a real-time retelling. Rather than the latitude of a short story which may lead, develop, motivate, direct and misdirect, and eventually confront the protagonist and the reader too, a poem is choosy, representative, focused. In a poem the elements of story are spare; you dress the skeleton to cover the narrative bones.

Think of inclusive experience in a poem like going car camping. You pack the trunk and back seat with a roomy tent, sleeping bag, a two-burner stove and gas lantern, maybe a lawn chair, a screen room, and an ice chest with raw meat and beer. Weight and space are not a big concern when you’re loading up a car.

But later you want to go backpacking. Now you have to streamline, reduce weight and space. You will want a lightweight tent and sleeping bag (shelter, not luxury), a compact stove and only the necessary utensils. Food choices are recalculated for nutrition and volume. You must carry only the essentials, because you and the pack frame are now the mode of transport. Think of a poem in its essence as the relative lightness and freedom of backpacking as opposed to the loaded car of experience that was packed in your garage.

Essence: The intangibles—Why does this poem matter? What is its human connection? 

The above questions are not answered directly in a poem as that makes it either didactic or dull as nothing is asked of the reader by way of thinking, association, or tracing its metaphors. The poet might not have clear answers to those questions either, but hinting at them is fine because ambiguity and mystery are mainstays in poetry. Essence asks “What is implied but not said directly?” and is often hard to paraphrase.

Strong poems reveal subtly, guide you toward the exit but let go before the push bar and the bright light. Weak poems announce their intent in a summative or explanatory fashion. There are exceptions to this, of course, but when I think of a poet like Mary Oliver, who can be rather annunciatory, her endings seem to me not slapped-on-the-table and here-you-go truisms, but challenging, proverbial, mindful endings because they leave me something to ponder, not a wrapped package.

Process: Bringing experience and essence together—The Squeeze

You work toward the essence of a poem when you comb it and cull unneeded detail, the extraneous information about an experience that is part of its formational notes but no longer part of the momentum that everything must serve. The first squeeze then is to get rid of the unnecessaries, the pretty wrapping, the ribbons and bows you love but know are there because you love them, not because they have to be. Go through your poem’s backpack and leave cans and bottles in the car.

The second squeeze to a new poem is to clear it of excess verbiage: redundancy, clutter like auxiliary verbs and the verb to be, adverbs, and unnecessary prepositional phrases and articles. Weigh every word for how it fits the poem’s language system (diction, denotation, connotation) and its figurative thread. 

Each squeeze (now we’re talking subsequent drafts) takes the poem closer to the melding of experience and essence, the right balance. Let the working elements of the poem bring the intangibles, the feelings and emotions; don’t blare them. If readers can sense lifeblood in a poem, they know there is a beating heart.

About the Writer

Kenneth Chamlee is a 2022 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Worcester Review, Ekphrasis, and many others, including eight editions of Kakalak: An Anthology of Carolina Poets. His poetic biography of 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, The Best Material for the Artist in the World, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin University Press in 2023, and his new book of poems, If Not These Things, will be published by Kelsay Books in the fall of 2022.

Website: kennethchamlee.com