Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
I believe in being exceptionally loose and free in the first draft. I believe in overwriting. I believe it’s easier to cut than to add.
To this end, I’d like offer you one of my favorite poems. To me, it’s “about” revision: Emily Dickinson’s “The Props Assist the House,” from the Poetry Foundation’s website.
In her introduction to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin writes that “[B]ecause Anne wanted to open All My Pretty Ones with a terse elegy for her parents, one shorn of all autobiographical detail, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’ went through innumerable revisions before arriving at its final form… .”
You can hear a recording of one of these “innumerable” drafts here. The text of the final version can be found here. I recommend listening and reading simultaneously.