Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
The Making of a Poem
by Rosanna McGlone
5 Islands Press
January 2025, Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-923248-06-9, $30aud
There is sometimes a perception that poetry arises from a poet ex nihilo: fully and perfectly formed, but that’s rarely the truth. The process of writing a poem can often take multiple drafts, reworking, condensing, restructuring, and recalibrating to create something that might appear effortless or spontaneous to the reader. In The Making of a Poem Rosanna McGlone gets deep into the process of poetry work, asking some of Australia’s most respected poets to share an early draft of a poem which is then compared to the finished version. The result is an eye-opener, providing a deep insight into how much effort goes into the crafting of a fine poem.
McGlone is a well-respected journalist with several books to her name, including The Process of Poetry, which did something similar with UK poets. She’s picked extremely well. The Making of a Poem has consistently excellent poems, worthy of emulation and worth buying for the selections alone. Being able to follow the transition from rough draft to finished poem provides fascinating insight. It’s isn’t some ineffable genius that creates such works, but hard yakka combined with a crucial sense of what does and doesn’t work which only comes with extensive reading and years of practice: the long apprenticeship that the poets featured here have clearly had.
The range of poems is quite broad, featuring such names as Anthony Lawrence, Gavin Yuan Gao, Judith Nangala Crispin, Judith Beveridge, Jaya Savige, Sara Saleh, Mark Tredinnick, Audrey Molloy, Sarah Holland-Batt, Bella Li, and John Kinsella. The poetry explores a variety of themes from the climate emergency/meta crisis to identity, oppression, death, love, self-harm, and aging. They are ecological, political, personal, funny, imagistic, and always impactful, ranging in style from free verse to sonnets, prose poems, ideograms, and concrete poetry. Some of the poems started out as free verse and ended up in a formal format, such as Anthony Lawrence’s “Spotted-Tail Quoll” which didn’t take its sonnet form until a later draft. The one he provides is draft twelve out of twenty-five. Lawrence said that some of his poems have up to eighty drafts! While this may be the outer limit on drafting, It might surprise readers to know how much work goes into taking a poem from the first concept to a finished, polished piece of literature.
A number of the poets included handwrite their poems first and some use a typewriter before refining the work on a computer. I was particularly taken with Judith Nangala Crispin’s “On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record,” partly because the transition from hasty scribble complete with arrows and instructions such as “[momentum – take out anything that slows the flow here]” to a polished prose poem that expands personal genealogy into a rich exploration of historical shame, identity and reclamation is so striking:
Charlotte is a map of a Country stained by massacres: Skull Creek, Poison Well, Black Gin’s Leap. A geography of skin and land—maps for the returning, for those who speak only a murderers’ tongue, whose songlines are erased, who consulted departments of births, deaths and marriages, who stood beside rented Toyotas, clutching photographs, in a hundred remote communities, asking strangers “Do you know my family? Can you tell me who I am?”
For each poet, there is a draft and final version of the poem followed by an interview with the poet. The questions, drawn from a close reading, explore the rationale and processes behind word choices and changes and there are also questions about influences, the poetry scene in general, slam and performance, poetry and activism, how to arrange a collection, working routines, and workshopping. As many of the poets included are also poetry judges, editors and mentors, McGlone asks questions about editing and judging criteria and the book has lots of helpful writing tips. Judith Beveridge’s response on what she looks for when judging, for example, is indicative of the valuable information that writers can gain from this book:
I value craft and aesthetics and appreciate when a poet has put a lot of time into how they are using form, structure, imagery and language. There has to be something exciting and memorable in the language. Many poems fail because they are too content driven. (36)
The Making of a Poem is a terrific book for anyone who loves good writing – poetry and otherwise. It’s full of beautiful poems, some of the best you will read, but also guidance, support and above all, an important reminder that everyone, even the most experienced of poets, starts with a blank page followed by a rough draft. As John Kinsella puts it:
Pretty much everything I do in every phase is critiqued, self-questioned; there’s almost an anxiety into putting everything in the right way in order to give the poem a life of its own. (99)