Copyright © JD Cottier
When I saw a course[1] on writing and editing poetry being offered at my local university, I thought I had misunderstood the course description. How can you learn how to write and edit poetry? Poets are born, not made. I don’t need someone to teach me strong emotions and then how to express those emotions with words. Fine for actors, perhaps, who spend their lives portraying emotions and feelings that may not be their own, but poets? I had this bizarre belief that editing a poem was cheating, or even worse, manipulating, the reader. It felt like the poet was corrupting the emotion or feeling that inspired the poem in the first place. What is even more peculiar about my belief is that it only applied to poetry. I know that novelists, journalists, non-fiction writers, etc., have a learned skill and their writing abilities should improve with practice and effort. I also believed writers should be ruthless editors of their own work - unless their work is a poem of course. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, I signed up.
My thinking changed on the first day of class when I realized that not only can a poet edit her poetry, she should. I finally understood that the first draft is just the beginning; a poem is a living thing that needs to be pruned, groomed, watered, fed, cuddled, and generally cared for until it has grown into what it should be – the full, clear expression of what you felt or want to say. Ideally, I want you to feel what I feel, or at least, understand it. At a minimum, I want you to feel something. Like any art, you may have a very different interpretation than the one intended, but the important thing is that you feel or understand something important has happened. The experience of reading a poem should not be the same as reading instructions on how to make soup.
When I wrote I had that dream again I wrote it all at once, as I usually do when I write a poem. This time though, I edited my poem, ruthlessly and repeatedly. I sat with it over several days and read and re-read it dozens of times. Almost every time I read it, I changed something or changed something back to what I had written originally.
In the following section, I go through this poem, which is in bolded italics, and explain how I applied some of the things I learned.
I had that dream again
where you throw yourself out the window
I learned a lot in this class, but one of the most important lessons is that every word matters and many of them must “punch above their weight”. Here I very deliberately used the word throw, rather than fell or jumped. Jumped can be a happy word – as in “jump for joy”, and the mood here is not happy. I also didn’t use the word “fell” because that would suggest an accident. Throw is the correct word here because we throw things out when they are no longer of use, are broken, or when we don’t want them anymore.
and I can’t stop you.
The word can’t is used here because I wanted to show that I felt powerless.
All I can do is look down
This can be read literally or metaphorically. Obviously, I would look down because she was on the ground beneath the window, but I also suggest (and this may be a bit too obtuse), that I am looking down in shame or despair because I couldn’t stop her.
and whisper …
We whisper when we want to keep something a secret or say something intimate. We also whisper at funerals.
But that’s not what happened
Not at all
I want to change the mood here, and I want it to be as sudden as waking up from a dream. I used the word But at the beginning of the sentence to suggest this suddenness. I say: Not at all to really emphasize this point.
The last time we were together we laughed, we joked, we reminisced
This sentence was important as it continues to emphasize the difference between the dream and what really happened. I wanted a skipping quality in the last part of the sentence, which I hoped would capture that it was fun and light-hearted. I also didn’t put a period at the end of the sentence because it felt unfinished.
But when the doctor said: Ready?
You looked …
Startled
I started another sentence with but for the same reason I did earlier, which was to once again indicate a sudden mood change. The word Startled stands alone, because if we want to emphasize a word we should give it a lot of space. I gave it its own line because in many ways it is the most important word in the poem. She had planned her death, yet she was startled because she was having so much fun and she looked like she had forgotten why we were all there. Startled definitely needed its own line.
like you had forgotten that it was today.
I still wanted that line attached to the startled, but on its own, so I didn’t capitalize the like.
But you nodded, looked at us,
wiggled your fingers, and said:
Toodle loo
And just like that, you were gone.
Once again I use the word But to start a sentence and for the same reason as before, for emphasis. I also describe exactly what happened and put her last words in their own sentence. Her last words had a gaiety – almost a silliness to them that seemed to make light of what was about to happen. I wanted to capture that so I kept that section as clean and as uncomplicated as I could. Whenever I read this poem aloud, even if I am alone, I always do what she did – wiggle my fingers. For the final sentence, I didn’t want to use the word dead. Dead is a heavy word and I have avoided using it. I wanted to evoke the idea of her being here one minute and gone the next.
Free, finally, from the pain and the inevitability of more and worse.
This line and the two lines that follow it (below) were added after I wrote the original poem. I realized when I read it that there was something missing and that was her reason for choosing her death through MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying). She had a terminal illness, she was in a lot of pain, and her death was imminent. I also needed to show that I supported her and respected her right to choose the time of her death, and without these lines in the context of the rest of the poem, that isn’t obvious.
So, I am happy for you and happy that you got to choose.
Everyone said that it was the perfect way to say goodbye.
Well, almost everyone.
I added the well here because I wanted a slight pause, which added emphasis to the words almost everyone.
The almost everyone is obviously (I hope) me. Her death was perfect because it was her choice and I am pleased she was laughing and joking one minute before she died. What threw me was that she was startled, as if she had forgotten. Her last words made the whole experience even more surreal. I wanted to capture that surreal quality in this poem.
I ended this poem the way it began, with the dream. I said in the beginning that I had the dream again and so repeated the first paragraph to stress that this is a reoccurring dream. There is a one-word difference from the original first paragraph; I replaced the word stop with the word save.
I had that dream again
where you throw yourself out the window
and I can’t save you.
All I can do is look down
and whisper …
I end the poem with her last words, said back to her.
Toodle loo, my friend
Toodle loo
[1] A version of this paper was submitted as a requirement for Life in Verse: An Introduction to Writing and Editing Poetry at Simon Fraser University 55 plus Liberal Arts Program. Emily Davidson, Instructor
Article Copyright © JD Cottier 2022