Out of my love for literature, I joined my high-school’s literary magazine. When, at the end of the year, it came time to arrange the order of the pieces we had accepted in the magazine, I took charge. Because we were idiots, we printed out all the individual pieces and laid them out on a table in the library on the penultimate week of the school year. I started to shift them around, moving the poem about eagles toward the front, dragging my own murderous melodrama towards the back, situating that photograph between those two pieces. Shuffling them around, I felt the power of revision at my fingertips. As someone who to this day still leaves much to the last minute, this might have been my first early substantive encounter with the revision process. The following is a poem from that year’s literary magazine.

I would learn much more about revision when I started revising the countless random poems I had lying around. Junior year, a newspaper article my grandma clipped for me introduced me to a local poetry slam, where competition spoken-word poetry events were held bi-weekly. The first poetry slam I ever competed in was simultaneously my best and worst experience with writing. Leading up to it, I slaved over a poem I wrote about my mom for a week, revising and rememorizing it each night, until it felt perfect. When I finally got on stage and performed it in front of the audience, my hands went totally numb and my breaths became short and spasmodic. This audio clip below is not that poem, but it does communicate, I think, how frightening I was.

When I sat down, exasperated, and sighed in deep relief, the judges awarded with me phenomenal scores, putting me in the lead. As was the rules, the winner of the first round was the first to go in the second. So, recalling my much less rehearsed second poem, I donned the stage, performed, went twice the time limit, received a huge penalty, and was promptly booted from the competition. I think there’s a moral somewhere in this story, but I’m not sure where. Certainly, I saw the power of revision, practice and care – but I also saw before me my own raw amateur foolishness. In the same night I performed a poem that made me feel incredibly proud and a poem that made me feel incredibly embarrassed. Never before had I experienced just how potent a tool writing was, how powerful it is when controlled, how explosive and dangerous it is when left wild and untamed.