Do You Know Where Your Poem Is Going? Plotters Versus Pantsers in Poetry
I’m sitting at a picnic table surrounded by poet friends. We’ve come to talk about poetry and to listen while cubes of watermelon chill our tongues. Inevitably, the question of process comes up. Yes, we write poems, but how? Inevitably, I’m the odd one out.
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How does the first draft come about? One says she starts with an image. Another says she starts with language. Everyone is nodding in agreement. Yes, images and language. No one says she knows where the poem is going when she sits down to write it.
I imagine being led by language must feel like being gripped by the small hand of a child who never shows her face but tugs the poet hurriedly through the garden. Or perhaps the poet is alone, taking her time to amble past the shrubs, only to return and try another path by the river. Ultimately, she stumbles around a bend where a bed of orchids awaits. Ah, says the poet, that’s what I was looking for.
But I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that way. If writing is a garden, I’m more like my mother, who plotted the landscape on hand-drawn maps until she knew exactly where the lilies and rhododendrons would go. Only then, she planted.
I tend to romanticize the idea of the wandering poet because it’s how I’ve always been taught writing is supposed to feel. It feels like setting out into the garden without a map. Thus, there are certain tenets of the process poets hold dear, which are privileged above others: that you must allow yourself to be surprised, and that you must not know the answer before you start writing. Poem (not poet) as oracle.
Louise Glück says, when writing, “I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. … Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it.” Carl Phillips says the poem is “not a way of getting somewhere, but a record of having been lost.”
I was in eighth grade, eagerly taking my first-ever creative writing elective, when Robert Frost’s oft-quoted golden rule of writing found its way to me: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Frost’s lesson comes to us from 1939. It’s hung around that long in the annals of writing classes and in our magical way of thinking about the writing process. But this stipulation seemed to me, even as a young writer when I first heard it, a tall order, a threat.
In the world of fiction, there are plotters and pantsers. Plotters predetermine the general outline and course of the novel they’ll write. Pantsers, by contrast, fly by the seat of their pants. They might have an idea of the direction they’re headed, but they’re not sure how they’ll get there. Poets, as a breed, are encouraged to be pantsers.
Plotting out a poem ahead of time can feel antithetical to the act of making poetry itself. We’re meant to be free beasts, unbound by outline or plot device, ready to rove in any direction on a whim, bewitched by the sound of a word, an unexpected collision of images.
As Louise Glück said, “It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves.” But what if that’s exactly what you have?
Most of the time, the poem first appears in my mind as a shape. Not in a technical sense; I’m not talking about formal verse or structural elements like line, rhyme, meter, stanza. I’m talking about the shape of the argument. The parts arrive unassembled, like puzzle pieces tossed to the table. But I already know there are a finite number of pieces, maybe five or seven, and each piece could be an image, or a piece of language, or a question, or the volta, or closure, and I begin to visualize how they fit together to make the shape I first envisioned.
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When I sit down to write, I start with a list of these ideas. Then I expand, riff, drag pieces around on the page until they settle into each other’s grooves. I know the finished puzzle is, for example, a horse galloping on the beach. I just have to put the pieces in the right place for the image to reveal itself. I’m not surprised by the horse; I knew at the outset what puzzle I was assembling.
Frank Bidart says, “Trying to make a poem, one measures the thing-that-is-struggling-into-existence against the containers that the world, the history of art offer it for existence.” Over the years of reading poems and essays and literature, I’ve internalized ways of gathering and ordering concepts, ways of asking questions and making arguments about the world, and those are my containers. The rhetorical argument in the poem is the hidden structure that lives inside the formal elements of poetry such as line and stanza.
There are many ways of making a poem. We may be in the minority, but I’m certainly not the only plotter in the poetry world. And the way of the plotter is not necessarily better. Charging forth headstrong down a predetermined route can be a struggle. If the only path to my destination is rained out, I will trudge through the mud as long as it takes. If I allow the language to bend away from my chosen path, I could write myself out of the poem I had intended to write. Sometimes, surprise can feel like failure.
I’ve been accused of impressing too much control upon my work. And they might be right. But I tend to value the poems I’ve written that say what I’d wanted to say, not those that say what the poem wanted to say. At times I have wandered on the page, allowing language to pull my ideas this way or that, arriving at the poem’s destination by having tripped over a rock hidden in the weeds. But I always end up feeling disconnected from those poems. The idea some external force (be it language or the muse) is exerting power over my thoughts feels entirely at odds with my intention to communicate. Some poets have the experience, every once in a while, of the received poem, which seems to arrive at the doorstep fully formed. I’ve experienced it myself. Those are the poems that feel easy to write by comparison. I rarely feel as if I’ve earned them.
It is the hard-won poems, the poems in which I set out to say something and successfully carved my path to that destination, that I can wholly claim as mine. I know this about myself and tend to write toward what feels whole. You might need to feel you’ve heard the call of language. I need to feel I’ve said my piece.
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We’re all thinking about language and argument and structure and even surprise as we write. We’re just thinking about them in different orders, and that is what we call our “process.” Someone at the picnic table says process is the least interesting thing about writing poetry. But I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how differently our minds work and what we value in the ways we discover meaning in the world, and the ways we translate that meaning for readers.
Returning to Robert Frost. The problem with buying fully into his idea of “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” is that it assumes the experience of writer and reader are one and the same. It suggests we cannot create surprise for our readers without first having felt it ourselves, that intentionally crafted emotion is ingenuine, a trick. But if poets can borrow from the plotters of the fiction world, we know that’s not the case.
In the end, there’s no requirement that we experience a particular journey as we put the poem to the page. The only requirement is that we write.
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Bidart, Frank. “Pre-Existing Forms: We Fill Them and When We Fill Them We Change Them and Are Changed.” pg. 619. (www.keble.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/TPE-Seminar-5.pdf)
Frost, Robert. “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Collected Poems. 1939.
Glück, Louise. “Internal Tapestries,” interview William Giraldi. Poets & Writers Magazine. September/October 2014. (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53de9ddce4b0536a4957b6dc/t/544a4046e4b07f6735262b9e/1414152262664/gluck.pdf)
Phillips, Carl. “What We Are Carrying: Meditations on a Writing Practice,” excerpt from My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations From a Life in Writing. 2022, Yale University Press. Poets & Writers Magazine, November/December 2022. (https://www.pw.org/content/guided_by_surprise)