Manuscript: Editing

Revising wasn’t as violent as I thought it’d be. A quick email exchange with my editors and I am reassured by their asking me not to change too much of Diwata.

Another poem title change: “noong unang panahon,” which means “once upon a time,” in Tagalog (which I suspected my using was pretentious or at least awkward), is now “Diwata,” which it was when it was untitled, and I simply referred to the growing body of untitled, linked prose poems as “Diwata,” and eventually Diwata, the poem and the book respectively. By the way, here is my serious usage peeve that I see all over Bloglandia: it’s incorrect to use quotation marks to indicate a poetry book title. Italics or underlining is the correct format for the titles of full length books (poetry books included), full length films, full length music albums. Quotation marks are for the titles of poems, short stories, songs, chapters, magazine articles. Get it right, people.

Anyway, back to poem titles: I find myself changing poem titles more than I think other poets do. Do other poets do this with some amount of frequency?

I have so many birds in Diwata, fierce predatory ones as well as little chirpy ones. Some of them are messengers of the people and the deities, and some of them are deities themselves. With my chirpy birds, I’ve used the term, “twitter,” and I’ve used it much. Of course these were the days before Twitter, and now it’s grating me to see this word used so often. I need some alternate words, and “tweet” doesn’t count, because I understand those who Twitter tweet.

There is some mildly overwrought poetic diction going on in here. In most places, it’s warranted. It’s storytelling language afterall, and I think the best storytellers do tell story with some amount of flourish. But some of my poetic diction is making me wince a bit; the poems can still be poetic and lovely without too much fancy wording.

Finally, for now: I find myself paying more attention to punctuation, including at the end of poetic lines. I’m finding that adding punctuation marks is helping some of the poems’ pacings, so hopefully those are good clues or cues to the reader to pace herself as she reads Diwata.

Tags: Diwata