3 Poems: Revise, Change, Break the Rules!

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday! (see link at the end)

Before I forget, if you live near Los Angeles, author/illustrator Barney Saltzberg, author Alexis O'Neill and I are once again teaching our one day class at UCLA, Writing a Picture Book and Getting it Published on March 7, 2020.

This class is always a kick and a half.  I hope to see some of you there!

Today is TeachingAuthors final post on "Revisioning 20/20"...and, as usual, we're all looking at this through a different pair of glasses. Bobbi introduces the topic in a post called Unsinkable, Carmela's brings in author Shirin Shamsi for A Wednesday Writing Workout called Befriending the  Revision Monster,  Mary Ann's is Revision: Re-learning to See, Esther's is One Writer's Rx for Achieving 20/20 Vision in 2020!, Gwendolyn's is Revising My Writing Life, Carmela's is called Celebrating Post #1300 and Revision as Re-Seeing, and Esther brings us debut author Mary Sandford in A Wednesday Writing Workout called Seven Ways to Beat Writer's Block.

Today, for your listening pleasure, I will post three poems.

Please give a warm welcome to Poem #1, on REVISION (previously posted here in 2009):

A WRITER ON HALLOWEEN

by April Halprin Wayland

I push open

the heavy door.
I take out the cleaver, the machete,

the switchblade, the scalpel, the penknife,

the X-acto knife.

I plunge my arm into the oily black pile of drafts

and haul one out.

And though it screams a thousand deaths,

I stab it over and over and over with the cleaver,

hacking it in two.

Then I amputate.

I sever. I cut.

I carve.  I slice.

Finally,

I mince words.

I take a breath and step back to admire my bloody work.

Then…I drop it back into the oily depths,

pack away the knives,

wipe the black spots off my desk

and leave.

I close the heavy door.

I will come back.

Tomorrow.

To do it all

again.

Egad! That's a grim one. If my poems have been edited (that poem needs to be even shorter!), I've changed, too. Though it still scares the bejeebers out of me, I don't see revision as quite as grisly these days. My writing (my life) will never be perfect. 

And speaking of being scared, Poem #2, a poem about working with Play Doh, is about the fear of being edited. (For a nonfiction poem and my Play Doh related editing exercise, click here):

CHANGE

by April Halprin Wayland

I pinch a pink pig,

gash a green grape,

coil a coral curl,

roll a red rope,

bend a blue bow,

swerve a cyan swan,

then share what I make!

But...

hey, don't change that!

No pig wears a hat!

No swan puts rouge on!

Oh, wait—that's a squid.

I like

what you did.

In proposing this topic, Carmela brought a thread of tweets from Debbie Ridpath Ohi to our attention. One says: “I'm a big believer in stepping out of one's comfort zone on a regular basis to avoid complacency & getting into a rut. I may fail spectacularly (& have) but picking myself up & persevering makes me stronger. If I succeed, my comfort zone's a wee bit bigger.”

Well!  That sounds good!  To me, getting out of a rut means breaking the rules! This year I am becoming aware of all the rules I lock into my life...and I'm ditching some of them.

photo by stevesphar from pixabay

And so we come to our final poem, Poem #3:

GARDEN RULES

by April Halprin Wayland

She wants one of those adorable gardens

with straight mounds of earth labeled

carrots, radishes, peas.

She wishes her grandmother had made a video

explaining how, exactly, you're supposed to tamp down

all these leaves, sticks, clods, roots flat as a tabletop.

Who knows the garden rules?

What ifshe does it wrong?

drawings and poems © 2020 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved

Thank you, Linda of TeacherDance for hosting Poetry Friday!

posted with love and a little help from Eli (my dog), Penny and Gin (our son and soon-to-be-daughter-in-law's dogs), shown here: