Revision Alchemy

I recently found the following equation in my commonplace book: revision = alchemy. Unsure what my unconscious meant by this, I turned to Wikipedia and found alchemy defined as “the process of transmutation by which to fuse or reunite with the divine or original form”. While that sounds a bit vague and grandiose, I like the idea of revision as a transformation that returns a draft to itself or makes a poem more original (more loyal to its own strange center).  

I also find that thinking of revision as alchemy (rather than as an attempt to repair or remodel or polish the poem) gives me more permission to let the process be time-consuming, messy, and not altogether knowable. I like too, that historical alchemists saw their work as a multi-staged process (with lots of different colored potions along the way) rather than a one-and-done product.  

Under all the mystic steam, alchemy is weird merger of art and science, instinct and method. In the alchemist’s laboratory (and shouldn’t all poets have libraries and laboratories?) ingredients are mixed and blended with the goal of arriving at a purified substance, a distilled essence. (A poet’s ingredients: words, images, line breaks, titles, epigraphs, blank space, punctuation, sounds etc.)  

Alchemy is an invitation to light a candle and scowl at the poem until it starts to make sense again. It’s a reminder that poems aren’t so different from soups. Adding a new element and giving the poem time to absorb it can be just as necessary and transformative as subtracting a mistake. Alchemy offers the writer-reviser more tools for distilling a draft into a poem—and it implies that the writer too will be changed by the process.  

For me this change to the writer is the real value in revision. It is, as they say in education, a highly transferable skill. When you spot the places where a poem falls short of itself (the places where line breaks disrupt momentum, the images that block the reader’s view) and nudge the poem into better alignment, you build an understanding of how experience (re)shapes your inner world; you remind yourself of your capacity for reshaping circumstances (what are poems if not small circumstances made of words?). Someone who can revise a poem is someone who can is someone who can transform their life (or their home, their work schedule, their city’s park system)—a better dream than turning lead into gold.  

Subscribe for biweekly inspiration to develop a creative practice that supports your writing and your well-being.