Member-only story
Write it Down
Use of the Journal for Poetry Practice
I recently added a “7 Poems in 7 Days” exercise for my Introduction to Creative Writing students. Each prompt will open at 5 AM and close at 4:59 AM the following day. The main instruction reads: “All poems must be written and revised with a pencil in a journal or on notebook paper. This is non-negotiable.”
I’m not a Luddite, and this isn’t technophobia or some sort of workaround to be sure student writers aren’t using AI. I’m pretty sure it’s good teaching.
Preserve the History of Your Poem
Writing by hand makes revisions visible. Writing by hand leaves traces we can use to think about how our writing came to be. In a notebook or journal, deletions are still visible under editing marks, lines and arrows. In a notebook or journal, insertions are squeezed into the margins. Hesitation leaves traces, too, in our handwriting. For example, in my journal I can go back to older work and see spaces between my words, and even between my letters, breaking my lovely cursive into weird chunks. This is a record of my mental labor while writing, a preservation of the history of a poem. It’s proof the final draft came from hard work, and the poem wasn’t perfect in the beginning. It grew and changed, and just like marks on a doorframe a parent makes as a child ages, I can…
