Author: Param Anand Singh

In this week’s Revisionings, the poet Shannon Burns shows the benefit of occasionally abandoning a poem’s candleness for the sake of a more universal thingness in the case of her poem “Blue Thing Feeling” from the recent and great Oosh Boosh (out now on 421 Atlanta). Here’s Burns:   .          .          .          .          . “Blue Thing Feeling” started out as a poem about blue candles called “Blue Candle Feeling.” I wrote it about an experience of being in the Yankee Candle Store in the...

In this week’s Revisionings, Ashley Farmer shows us the small choices on which hung large aesthetic consequences in the editing of her novella, The Farmacist, available from Jellyfish Highway Press. .          .          .          .          . Drafting the pieces that comprise this book was like playing a game: many starts ended in failure, I got better with practice, and sometimes I just got lucky. Though it’s a short book comprised of short prose sections, the revision process took considerable time. What I thought about...

This week, Cheryl Quimba offers us a view of the process behind “Scattered Trees Grow in Some Tundra,” the title poem of a chapbook currently available from Sunnyoutside Press.   .          .          .          .          . I first wrote the poem that came to be called “Scattered Trees Grow in Some Tundra” in 2009 as part of my MFA thesis. I had it in my head that I wanted to write a long poem. I was a big admirer of George Oppen, and I particularly...

Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women (Ahsahta Press, 2015) is filled with prose as lyrical as it is engaged. And it topped SPD’s bestseller list for three separate months accordingly. In this week’s Revisionings, Boyer reveals a deleted passage from the book and considers the task of revising a manuscript of uncertain genre.   .          .          .          .          . Garments Against Women is a book about what isn’t, so most of what I have to say about revising it has to do with what could...

I’ve got to publish this now before it gets old. At the AWP conference, everything is pregnant—if not pregnant, then immediately postpartum—timely, anyway. The typical slowness of writing and publishing vanishes into a state of emergency. And now I’m beginning to feel the stale adrenaline. So here we go. Quick! I felt very, very behind the eight ball getting ready for AWP. I didn’t tweet or post responsibly to let anyone know I would be there. I was editing, printing, cutting, stapling right until the very last moment—talking homeschooling with a stranger at Staples’ Self-Service Copy Center with my...