Unblock
When the draft has gone cold
When you return to a draft and it feels like someone else wrote it — a ten-minute re-entry exercise drawn from Hirshfield on distance.
A draft left for a week comes back strange. The lines you were sure of seem tentative; the ones you dismissed look useful. This estrangement is not failure — it is the distance Jane Hirshfield calls necessary to see what is actually on the page rather than what you intended to put there. The exercise below uses that distance as a tool.
Try this
Read your draft aloud, slowly. Do not correct as you go. When a line makes you wince, mark it. When a line surprises you, mark it differently. Write for five minutes starting from the line that surprised you most.
Share your poemFurther reading
- Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (opens in a new tab) — HarperCollins
Hirshfield on "The Question of Distance" — the necessary strangeness between a writer and their own draft.