This is a 124-word poem. The arithmetic mean line length is 10.33 words. Lines 9 and 11 are the longest. Line 7 is the shortest.
There are 4 stanzas. There’s a 2-line couplet, a 4-line quatrain, and two 3-line tercets for 12 lines total.
It follows an ABBACCADDABB rhyme scheme.

Let’s go back to the oldest draft of this poem and see what changes I’ve made along the way.

-----[oldest version from July 2017]----------------

Bird pick at weed in rocks

Bird finds shade

And flutters

Looking despite no food

Pick whatever is left

Is there plant

Is there root

Or are there only rocks?

Note: this is my first draft using this subject matter, inspired by watching birds walk around in the backyard. It has a waltzy iambic trimeter (3 stressed syllables per line), which I liked at the time. It has the major plot beats that carry over into later drafts. But the draft is too focused on the literal subject matter instead of embracing a poem’s flexibility. It also centers the human character too much.

I can tell there is a good idea in here somewhere.

When I encounter a draft that doesn’t work, I ignore it and work on something else until have enough emotional distance to come back to it. I don’t always have that much self-awareness, but it can happen sometimes.

I can get too in the weeds constantly revisiting a draft. I lie to myself that every first decision is both spontaneous and perfect. This poisons the draft in my head, transitioning it from “there is no way I could improve this” to “maybe one or two tiny tweaks” to “the way I’m writing this now isn’t doing what I want” into “the entire idea is bad and I’m an idiot for thinking this was a good idea in the first place.” One extreme to another.

When any of that kind of thinking happens, the draft is taking too much of my brain energy and not using the brain energy to actually adapt into my tastes - so I need to stop thinking about it until it’s ready for me. Sometimes that is a matter of months or years, as you can see in this example. But I need to remind myself “you are a good writer. There is something at the core of this that captured your imagination. Let it find you.”

Then I can come back later and say “Ohhhhh, that’s what I was trying to do!”

If you can’t think of something you want to change or improve about a draft, you are probably too close to it right now. I am trying to point as much nitpicky precision at my own work as I let myself pick at anyone else’s.

-----[old version from April 2019]----------------

The small bird enters through the door I leave, flutters against the brand-new ceiling then

sinks to the ground, too scared for anything else

Someone braver than me follows, collects the scattered bird in his hands.

The bird moves outside, now unsure of its own wings, hops to a tree’s shade, something a little more familiar.

Note: this draft has the major plot beats that carry over into later drafts. I’m happy that I was able to start narrowing in on what the core of the poem is. But the draft is also too focused on the literal subject matter instead of embracing a poem’s flexibility. It centers the human character too much.

-----[old version from June 2019]----------------

A small bird enters through the door, flutters against the sudden ceiling then

sinks to the ground, now unsure of its own wings.

The bird can’t rediscover the door.

Up once, and an air conditioner is no breeze for purchase.

Up again. The shaky feathers brush the fake of the window.

A pair of brave hands collects the scattered bird

and pushes the world open again.

Now, no ceiling or door or breeze or window.

The bird hops to a tree’s shade.

Bird looks for food.

Bird picks through whatever’s here, never too far from the floor.

Note: this draft starts to use more structure and deliberate tone. There are multiple attempts from the bird to fly. I can tell there’s enough rhythm here to get it closer to a sonnet, but I’m not there yet. It’s smushed together into one stanza in a way the final version isn’t.

It also moves away more from the human character.

-----[old version from 2020]----------------

Small bird enters through room, flutters against sudden ceiling then

sinks to ground, now unsure of wings. Bird can’t rediscover door.

Up once? Yearning to air conditioner. No breeze for support.

Another? Shaky feathers brush fake sky. Window. Down again.

Bird rustles on imbalanced feet. Steadier. One more try? Ascent.

Crash. Then pop. Shattered radius and paralysis. Advent:

Two digital branches extend from tree-high leviathan.

Branches collect panicked bird and push open to sky with ease.

Now, no ceiling or door. Now, no window or branches or breeze.

Bird hops to tree's shadow. Instead of canopies, bird picks den.

Bird pecks at whatever food falls close by tree. Home. Nothing more.

Bird moves fine now. Flying bird never moves too far from the floor.

Note: this draft is the closest to the final version. It uses tercets instead of couplets. It takes on the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet. The transition from this draft to the final version is specific word choice.

That’s a good sign! When the changes get smaller and more specific like this, I’m getting closer to a draft I’m happy with. I’m not throwing away entire sheets of paper at a time. I’m scratching and rewriting individual words. It’s finally the point where I’m ready to be in the weeds.

--------------------

My first poetry craft draft showed one way to develop a draft in a new direction using the same subject matter throughout.

I chose to present that type of revision before this one because it assumed you have a draft ready to go and want to revise it.

This poetry craft draft will go in the opposite direction. It starts with a completed poem and breaks it apart, breaking down all the applied techniques while comparing it to previous iterative drafts. That’s why the previous format is not the meat of this exploration. It isn’t just the same subject matter - it’s the same poem approaching its final form.

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Part 1: The Literal Subject Matter

First things first - what happens in the poem? A bird flies into a room. It hits the ceiling, then hits the window. The bird breaks its wing. Then it gets picked up by a person and brought back outside. But now it doesn't fly.

We can tell the poem has literal subject matter: birds, rooms, trees. Talking about “I” and “you” as characters or abstract subjects like “love”, “life” or “destiny” requires a lot of contextual baggage from the audience so they understand you. Physical objects like a bird and a room require less baggage. If this is figurative language, we can make it richer when it is not as abstract as the concepts themselves.

The bird interacts with unexpected elements, especially artificial elements: air conditioner instead of breeze, window instead of sky, a person instead of a tree. The word “canopies” also suggests both “a part of a tree”, the natural structure, and “a tent”, the artificial structure.

“Shaky feathers brush fake sky” is a generous way of describing the bird hitting the window. It focuses on the bird’s emotion. “Window. Down again.” is the other blunt and punctuated description of the same impact. It focuses on snapshot moments of cause - effect.

I deliberately break the metaphor by describing the “tree-high leviathan” as having hands so the reader understands there is both a literal tree later and a different object the bird mistakes for a tree now.

Describing the bird as picking for food when that was not a previously mentioned motivation for the bird entering the scene is like a vocabulary version of a montage passing time. Most of the poem happens in seconds, maybe a few minutes. The ending is longer than that. The use of the word “never” helps drive that home. The rest of the poem is reframed as a chaotic, quick event with a long-term consequence.

The poem has a third-person point of view and reminds me of a fable personifying an animal’s adventure. It’s empathetic but not sentimental.

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Part 2: Formal Techniques and Puns

I paid attention to how the words sounded in the final draft.

“Flutters” and “sudden” have assonance.
“Sudden ceiling” and “sinks” have consonance.
“Crash” and “pop” are onomatopoeias.
“Shaky” and “fake” form an internal rhyme.

Some phrases are puns (“shattered radius” - like the bone in a wing and the area around the bird it feels comfortable moving in). Stanza 3 originally read "Two digital branches extend from tree-high leviathan", which looks like a pun on "digital" referring to fingers. But it's not cohesive enough to be a solid pun. Even I have standards.

Again, “canopy” isn’t really a pun but is meant to have multiple meanings.

The human character feels like an intrusion because as much as we're watching the bird in the third-person point of view, it is still the bird's point of view.

The oldest version puts too much emphasis on the human character, something else I tried to avoid as much as possible in other stories like “The Tree and The Moth”.

The word “advent” evokes birth/nativity or adventure, but it’s placed at the end of a stanza.

The line break between “ascent” and “crash” is designed to break your heart, ending a phrase with hope and starting another phrase with failure. It’s an enjambment continuing the line’s action through to the next line, but it’s disguised as an end-stop. I’ll mention later a specific scene I used as emotional inspiration for this.

This wordplay and enjambment - and treating something as serious as an injured animal with some humor - put the reader off-balance, just like the bird is. The scene is absurd. The human doesn't expect the bird, and the bird doesn't expect the human. The inside is weird, but the outside is weirder. The bird is uncomfortable and has a difficult time moving around in the room, but the opposite is true once the bird leaves.

The puns combine to mess with you and make you feel uneasy, the same emotional place as the bird. I’m assuming the audience is as awkward and uncomfortable with the subject matter of an injured animal as the speaker in the poem is. The reader can inhabit both points of view at the same time.

The bird not flying and staying on the ground even when it has the opportunity to fly again is also a case of situational irony.

The audience expects a fish released from its hook to swim away and a bird released from a cage (even a room-shaped cage) to fly away. The poem is tragic because this does not happen, despite best efforts. Tragedy and irony don’t always appear in the same places, although many tragic stories use irony to their advantage. Even more, tragedy describes a structure and the character flaws that make that structure foreboding. It’s not just knowing that Romeo and Juliet die from the beginning, but that their own character flaws and environment make that death happen. Irony doesn’t require that structure, character flaws, or even tone. A bird flying away can be a symbol of freedom and victory. Neither of those are the ending of this poem - it is both tragic and ironic.

If the bird died inside the room, that would be tragic but not ironic. We know the room is not the natural habitat or particularly safe for the bird.

If the bird flies back into the room after it is released because it’s a pet and thinks this is playtime, that would be ironic but not tragic. We thought the room was less safe than it really was.

Yes, I’m one of the people who would have been part of the Alanis Morissette discourse back in the nineties.

The poem uses a rhyme scheme that doesn’t match either a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet, two of the most common European sonnet styles. Speaking of sonnets…

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Part 3: Structures

The poem is structured like a classic Shakespearean sonnet. But it deliberately breaks apart its stanzas and rhyme scheme to mess with you, and it’s not in iambic pentameter.

The first of the bird’s three tries to get up is the end of a stanza. The deus ex machina of the hands rescuing the injured bird is the end of a stanza. This is not just an exploration of a mood like most classic sonnets. It is much closer to something like Poe’s “The Raven” with a dramatic plot (which also involves a bird intruding on a narrator).

An appeal of a 21st-century sonnet, even a slightly modified sonnet, is its intentionality. Lay readers who don’t read much poetry but who read Shakespeare in their high school English classes can tell at a glance “This is poetry and it has a purposeful structure” because of its obvious meter and rhyme scheme. Sonnets are an archetypal example of poetry because of Shakespeare: they are often a form that comes to mind when people think “poem”, along with nursery rhymes. Works that are significantly shorter and use line breaks that seem less intentional don’t get that built-in recognition as much. Unnecessarily short length, repetitive word choice, haphazard line breaks, muddled or lean figurative language, and vague, shallow subject matter are all common complaints of contemporary “insta-poetry” shared across social media. Some evocative or empathetic works can lack the formal, recognizable elements of craft that make the work feel intentional.

I’m no stranger to free verse or even prose poetry. But intentionality is key here.

Developing the draft from a single stanza into a sonnet helped me solidify the specific plot beats I wanted. The formal structure forced a more coherent plot from the quicker and messier previous drafts.

The poem is also structured like a comedy skit.

A high school theater class I took broke down our skits into the simplest possible dramatic structure.

You set up the environment
Find a problem
Try to solve it one way - fail
Try another way - fail
Try one last way - succeed
Then the problem forms again. Womp womp.

It’s not reinventing the narrative wheel by any means. But it’s simple and easy to use. This poem draft below about a vending machine that works like an arcade game uses the same structure, the onomatopoeic plot beats, limited definite articles, and similar environmental feedback as this “small bird” draft. Here, the feedback comes from messages from the machine instead of walls and ceilings. Think of it like a sacrificial poem. (That’s a joke for all my poetry slam friends.)

Arcade vending machine

A distant corner of the arcade. A huddle of boys.
High score. Bag of chips.
Offer coin — nothing in return.
YOU LOSE.
CONTINUE?
Jingle.
Creaking. Button dented. Ready to drop.
Two bags stick each other to the wall. Flashing light. No score.
YOU LOSE.
TRY AGAIN?
Jingle.
Press press press. Thud. Thud. Push. Tilt. Slam. Shove. Dance.
Stop dancing. Give back stolen change.
No luck.
GAME OVER.
Empty handed. Empty pocketed. Boys, gone.
The next customer, pocket jingling, wins three chips and doesn’t stay for credits

“Small Bird” uses this structure in service of tragedy, but you can see it works just as well for a setup to a punchline.

The volta - the last two lines of the sonnet that reveal the bird doesn’t fly anymore - is one technique sonnets use to twist and surprise and break your heart. In the vending machine example, it was the last line.

The puns and somewhat comedic individual images contrast with the overall tone. An injured animal is being cared for and rescued. How could that be morally ambiguous? How could that be awkward? These are spaces a poem can explore.

The bird becomes a more animated character just by referring to it as “bird” instead of “the bird”. This was one of the changes in the 2020 revision of the poem encouraged during a poetry class. I removed those types of articles so there was a greater focus on the subjects themselves. Of course, removing words changes the meter of the sonnet, so I had to reword or change the lines so they fit again.

Puns are an opportunity to take full advantage of your subject matter.

I like the final draft as it is right now, but it’s easy to imagine different techniques for turning the tone toward overt comedy. Make the sound effects less harsh (a “bonk” instead of a “crash”). Emphasize the bird’s confusion more than its panic. If it keeps the injury at all, make the bird recover quickly or shrug it off. As I mentioned before, reimagine the bird’s rescue as awkward instead of smooth. Or make the recovery so smooth the bird doesn’t even notice it’s back outside at first. Give the bird more success at flying after leaving the room.

I don’t want that much comedy in this poem, but the point is lots of the core subject matter and plot beats can stay pretty consistent even with a different tone - and, like the other revisions here show, with different poetic forms, too.

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Part 4: There Are Other Poems About Birds

I have included some other poems and posts for comparison.

Believe it or not, I’m not the first person to ever write a poem about a bird.

When you’re writing a poem, you’re probably not coming up with totally brand-new subject matter. You’re probably writing what you know from what you experience in the world around you. Or you’re using experience and references from real-life subject matter.

I mentioned in my fake newspaper style guide how this makes your audience feel more familiar with your story, even though it’s new because you’re the person telling it. I find it helpful to draft a poem with what I feel in the moment and then go out to other poems or stories when I’m ready to revise. How do other writers capture that emotion I’m going for? How do they use the same subject matter and different emotions?

Your audience will put your work in conversation and in context with what they know, even if you don’t. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It means you’ve made a connection with your audience.

Some examples of other poems about birds that achieve similar subject matter or effects - which I can only aspire to:

This Tumblr post, the original version of which is deleted but has been reblogged (rescuing a bird)

The Kildeer Chick by Richard Ownes (rescuing a bird)

Saving Grace by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (rescuing a salamander)

There Is a Bird in My Mouth by Natalie Scenters-Zapico (associating an encounter with a bird with luck, and the violence of encountering a bird in the wild)

Bird Left Behind by Sophie Cabot Black (a bird disoriented by an unfamiliar environment)

I had a difficult time trying to think of a way for the person's hand to evoke tree branches, which is the closest thing I imagine the bird could compare with a tall human. This Mary Ruefle poem, “The Hand” helped me focus my vocabulary. This Seamus Heaney poem, “St Kevin and the Blackbird” also evokes similar hand-related bird imagery.

Compare the chaotic entrance of the bird to William Butler Yeates’s “Leda and the Swan”, in which the intrusive bird has much more malicious motives.

Maya Angelou made famous use of bird imagery in her poetry, making comparisons between a bird that can fly freely and a bird that can’t.

The phrase “nothing more” nods to Poe’s “nevermore” from his famous bird poem “The Raven”, which also features a bird that enters a room suddenly and really ruins the vibe.

I also thought a lot about the “I will go sailing no more” scene from Toy Story (1995), which has similar themes. Buzz Lightyear has insisted throughout the movie that he is a real space ranger and can fly. In this scene, he sees himself in a television ad: undeniable proof that he is a toy. He tries to fly one more time and falls to the ground. It’s a short sequence full of pathos. In my poem, the line break between “ascent” and “crash” has a similar design as that scene. It is the other thing that breaks your heart besides the volta. It breaks your heart by ending a phrase with hope and starting the next phrase with failure.

Many amateur writers start a draft worrying that they have to have completely new and original subject matter. They see and hear complaints from pop culture about pop culture. They read about heroes with a thousand faces, reboots, and “nothing new under the sun”. Real birds have been in real buildings before.

Don’t worry about this too much, especially when you are just starting out. Genres exist for a reason - because people know what they’re getting into. Instead of a reader being thrown into a narrative room with ceilings of all flavors every time they want to read a poem, they can pick from broader categories with patterns they know they like. This is not a bad thing. It shows that you know what genres and patterns already exist and that you can use them to your advantage.

Regardless of whether you think my poem is particularly good or not, you can make good art with familiar, even expected, even dreaded subject matter.

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Conclusion

This craft draft doesn’t just show some iterative revisions. Putting the draft in context this way helps demonstrate “creative” techniques. It borrows from literal subject matter so the audience can understand what they are seeing to the extent that the borrowing is convenient. It infuses that literal subject matter with emotional and evocative connections. It supports variety in service of those interpretive connections, even if this causes impossible or unlikely interpretations when compared to the original subject matter.

The poem, for me, captures the experience of starting something new. I was in college and homesick when I wrote the first drafts of this poem, and I was both unsure of my wings and grateful for the branches that collected me.

I don’t have to worry that I’m “reading too much into” the bird’s emotional state or describing an event that didn’t happen or giving a few moments of time the consideration of an entire poem (and thousands of words along with it). That’s the point of the art. Poetry, in particular, struggles against this kind of assumption that ephemeral experiences are not worth serious consideration. And yet that is the appeal of poetry in the first place.

Reimagining the free verse draft as a sonnet - and changing poetic forms in general - can force you to emphasize the imagery at the draft’s core.

The emotional empathy with the bird character, the attentiveness to individual word choice and imagery, the deliberate rhymes, rhythmic structure and repetition all lend themselves into a poem. Another good heuristic for a work of art is that it could not be any other medium than what it is. This draft works as a poem in a way that it would not work as a prose short story, for example.

At the same time, a poem shouldn’t just list emotions. A poem should do something to them: explore, elaborate, echo them into new places. In the same way that readymades without the context of presentation in an art environment are difficult to recognize as structures, there is a difference between making a work feel spontaneous but careful versus making it feel haphazard and careless. It doesn’t have to be totally original, but it has to have care. Poems are like cakes: people usually say they like cakes fresh out of the oven, but they often just don’t want them half-baked.

Looking for these structures and techniques in your writing can help you take full advantage of your artistic medium.

The revision started with granular changes of single words at a time. Then, it followed up with reinterpreting the tone and genre of the poem. At the end, it connected the poem to a larger genre of existing work.

In fact, the revision expanded outside of its genre and outside of its format. It borrowed from fiction, social media nonfiction prose, and a scene from an animated movie. Poets should certainly have passion for their artistic format of choice, but they can learn even more from art in other mediums and formats. They should love poetry and be friends with the other arts. It’s helped my imagination considerably.

When you’re thinking of revising your own creative work, try using this process. Rely on your intuition for drafting. Many great ideas come when you are not expecting them. But comb through the work when you’re editing and look for these elements. Like I just said about genre, you don’t have to feel like you’re reinventing the wheel each time you write a poem. Looking at other approaches and techniques can help you refine the core of your artwork.

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"Small Bird" Craft Draft

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Drafts

Part 1: The Literal Subject Matter

Part 2: Formal Techniques and Puns

Part 3: Structures

Part 4: There Are Other Poems About Birds

Conclusion

Introduction

This craft draft is an iterative poetry revision with comments throughout. The essay:

reviews and compares multiple drafts

describes the use of literal subject matter

discusses specific formal techniques, like literary devices, irony and wordplay

offers context and comparison to other poems

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CW: The poem is about injured animals, and the craft draft references other poems about injured animals. It also references the William Butler Yeates poem “Leda and the Swan”, which features imagery of sexual violence.

The Drafts

Part 1: The Literal Subject Matter

Part 2: Formal Techniques and Puns

Part 3: Structures

Part 4: There Are Other Poems About Birds

Conclusion