Anatomy of a Poem: “Election Day”

I try to carry a poem around in my head as long as possible before putting it on paper. For me at least, it’s too easy to fall in love with anything set up in type. And love blinds one to difficult decisions. So walking around with Poetic Possibilities in mind, for days—or weeks, or longer—abstractly juggling and re-arranging them, allows me to establish the perimeters of a poem, and the necessary steps of its argument. Or so it seems, until the first sketch is typed up. It’s then that previously unthought-of directions suggest themselves; or one image leads unexpectedly to another; or a rhyme scheme needs freshening and the change prompts a reversal of emotion.

It usually takes a long while to finish a poem, but sometimes the process is, for one reason or another, speeded up. Here is one instance.

In mid-October I got a telephone call from an editor on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Occasionally for holidays or turns-of-season, they’ll ask a few poets for work to run. For the first time, he said, they wanted to run a few poems on Election Day, 2008. Would I contribute? I agreed, because I think of myself as patriotic but not political. (Oh yes, I voted for Obama, am a registered Democrat and have been all my life. But “political” poems bore the pants off me—so Earnest, so Self-Righteous.)

Here is the first page I then wrote up, the top half of it isolated lines or phrases that I thought might be useful, and the second half of it the start of a poem that the earlier phrases had led to. I usually then take a typed page and begin to sketch what will follow, even as I begin to revise what I’ve just written.

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March 26, 2009, 12:15pm · election day, pbs, poetry, the new york times, the news hour with jim lehrer