A Poetry Craft Essay by Abbie Kiefer
THE GENEROUS ACT OF PUBLISHING DRAFTS: Letting Poems Exist as Iterations

Most of the poems in my debut book, Certain Shelter, appeared first in journals—and in almost every case, the book version of a poem differs from the original. Often the edits are minor. But I’ve also changed titles, cut stanzas, added details, lineated prose poems, prose-poemed some quatrains, chopped an essay into a six-part essayette, pared down lines too long for the printed page, and introduced a few references to plums, which are my second-favorite fruit.

Some of the work of shaping a collection is considering the relationships between poems. I wanted the pieces in my book to feel tightly linked—to belong to each other—and that inclination guided many of my revisions. So I added callbacks, re-mentioning a specific town or river or stone fruit. I trimmed away information that was necessary in standalone poems but unnecessary within the context of the book. I reworked titles to make them more similar. When consecutive pieces looked too similar, I tried new forms. I gave myself permission to change the poems in whatever way best served the project.

But I also changed some poems to improve the craft. I wrote this book over six or seven years, and the older a piece was, the more likely I was to be dissatisfied with it. I had small regrets (wrong-sounding word, sloppy line break) and major ones (superfluous descriptions, too-obvious endings). I wasn’t just writing a book. I was issuing corrections.

I’m proud of how the project turned out. I’ve done the best I can for this collection and the poems appear precisely as I want them. For now, anyway. Because I recognize that future-me will undoubtedly cringe at something now-me felt gratified to write.

At the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading, Sharon Olds prefaced her poem “Quarantine” like this: “I just thought that before I read my poem I would show that I rewrote it a little since it was in my book because I read it at a reading and there was something wrong with it. Something in the beginning especially and I fixed—I think I fixed it.” She explains that she removed four adjectives and one adverb from the first version and changed a noun. “So I’m very ha—I’m not afraid.”

A poem can be part of a critically acclaimed collection and also be not quite right, Olds is telling us, though the poem had seemed right to her at one time. And she can’t even be certain she’s completely addressed the problem. She starts to claim to have fixed it, then backtracks. She thinks she’s fixed it, she amends, which implies future changes may be required. And while she begins to say she’s happy with the newer version, she says instead that she’s not afraid. The audience claps and whistles.

I love what Olds offers us here. Isn’t that the task of every writer? To be not afraid? Not afraid to make work and not afraid to let strangers read it and judge it and not afraid to acknowledge the work’s failings and to try to fix those failings, even if the piece was previously declared finished. Even if it’s already been printed in a collection and that collection is up for the National Book Award, for instance.

Which brings me back to the idea that I was issuing corrections while putting together my book. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Keetje Kuipers was asked how she knows a poem is ready to be published. “I don’t mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines,” she says. “In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I’m sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.”

I love this as well—this practice of sharing drafts with readers. In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future. How comforting to know that even Sharon Olds needs to make corrections. How freeing to think of them as Keetje Kuipers does—not as corrections but as incarnations. Each version of a poem granted its own place in the world. The first version with the plums in it and the second one with pears because plums are trite, aren’t they, and the third iteration with the red plums back in because they are delicious and nearly my favorite fruit, even if William Carlos Williams liked them too, and so it should be plums, I’ve decided. For now.

Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places. She is on the staff of The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.