"poems are so much better if I let them inhabit the best potential of themselves" Francisco Márquez on Revising "Lullaby"
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Incited by his neighbor’s persistence as a singer, Francisco Márquez drafted a poem he called “Apartment Music.” But, as he revisited and reworked, molding and reshaping that first draft, he arrived at something entirely new. To uncover the vase hiding within the clay, he stacked new drafts, stray lines, and rearranged stanzas on top of the last, creating a document of reverse chronology where each new version usurps the last. In the document below, you’ll find the many iterations of “Apartment Music,” which eventually became “Lullaby” and was published by the Poetry Foundation. Below that, you'll find my conversation with Marquez about the revision process.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Thank you so much for sending me that progress document. It was so cool to essentially watch you work.
Francisco Márquez (FM): Of course. It's really vulnerable, but it's also great because I take revision very seriously. I also think it’s valuable to intimately share these details because revision is rarely taught, one usually has to learn it on their own, and it takes so much work and time.
BTR: In the first draft, but also the notes that precede it, the neighbor and his singing seem to be the focus of the poem. And yet the boy's tower from the mother's song becomes a focal point as revealed by the many renderings of that line in your revision notes. So, how do you locate the heart of a poem? And how often does it depart from that inciting observation?
FM: Sometimes I know what the central image is and I write toward that. But part of the process is staying open to the idea that the thing you're obsessing over actually may not serve you in the end. And that was the process with this. I had a neighbor who spent all his time singing. I was dealing with my own things with my writing so I found it inspiring that he would just practice a run of notes over and over again. He was very focused on his practice and it was a little annoying but also kind of charming; he would almost never hit the high note, but he never had any qualms about listening to the song again. That was enough to get me going. As you can probably tell, I tried to keep that initial premise as much as possible in many drafts. And it got to the point where I almost gave up on the poem because it felt like maybe the story wasn't good enough—and that realization was the hinge moment. In the revision process, if the central image that I have starts weighing the poem down or weighing me down, then I know that the heart is elsewhere. In this case, the heart of the poem came when I realized that the poem is about music, about me asking myself: what song could I hear over and over again?
BTR: It's evident in the drafts how long you spent with this image of the singer before it became more about music in general. Do you consider the work and the effort toward perfecting these images that don't end up in this poem a loss? How do you cope when the final ends up so far removed from what you spent the most time on?
FM: I have this deep faith in the fact that if the image is really powerful, it will find itself back even in a new form, in a new orientation, in a different kind of language. The spirit of that image will come back. And I've tried to practice a kind of detachment from the images because I think a lot of my really early poems would not find their footing because I was too narrow in my focus. I've found that the poems are so much better if I let them inhabit the best potential of themselves. Almost like in a relationship—you don't want to control the other person to meet your needs, you want to meet them halfway, see how you both can compromise. If I'm trying too hard to explain the mechanics of the story, it's not going to work. It shouldn't be that hard to tell you what is happening: that's my tell.
BTR: You tried out a few forms for this poem: it started as a single stanza with long lines, then it became a stanza of small paragraphs, then couplets, tercets, back to one stanza, and then you eventually landed on short quatrains. Is changing the form a tool for revision or a result of revision?
FM: I see it as a tool, definitely. I like to work in these organic forms because I find that the key to the poem is in the length of the lines, the way they work in tandem with form. Nine times out of ten, the heart will start becoming clear through the way the lines work as a unit in their stanzas. I'll start finding the rhythm of the language and I'll start getting an idea of how quickly or slowly the poem should move. Couplets are great but sort of slow, so if I think a poem is already slowish, and I put it into couplets, it's going to drag things down a little bit. If I want something to be more narrative and move quicker, then a tercet is perfect because it's sort of unstable. And then quatrains are much slower, but they're more formal, more measured. So, when you see me changing it around like that, something's not working. I gotta try this, I gotta try that.
BTR: I also noticed that you segment the poem and work on each part. Can you describe how that factors into your process?
FM: A lot of this comes from Catherine Barnett, a grad school teacher of mine. She was a revision maniac; her expression was “keep the clay wet,” meaning keep molding it, keep pushing it around. She also taught expansion and compression. So I find that if the image is limited, in this case the singer, I'll just write into it more. I tell myself, this is really interesting, so why don't I try fleshing it out? On a page toward the end of that progress document, there are these long lyrical lines where I just wrote out what I was thinking, and I think that's another way in which I segment the poem. If I feel like I'm walking around the thing, as an exercise, I’ll try to literally say what I mean, not try to hide it in any kind of lyrical language. I'll ask myself, what is this really about? It's about me being interested in having a relationship with art like my neighbor. Sometimes you just have to say it, even to yourself.
BTR: In lines about the boy, you used words like “martyr,” “rapturous,” “pious,” and “faithful” to elicit his religious devotion, which is present for many early drafts and hints at artistic devotion. Do you often create that kind of image system or does that come when you've latched onto a theme or topic?
FM: It's hard to say. In the case of this poem, I was desperate to find a metaphor, but I wasn’t sure what it had to be. I think one way of going about it was by realizing that the lullaby my mom used to sing was a religious song, and so I knew there was a strong connection there. I do see writing as a discipline and a faith, a kind of monastic thing you have to keep doing forever. But even though that could serve as a strong metaphor for the ending, it felt forced. So, most of the time, I think the image system comes organically for me. If I'm trying to quickly tie in a thing at the end, then I know—not in the moment, but afterwards—that I'm trying to force the image. These short poems are usually the harder ones to write because I have to travel the entire journey before I look back and say, “what was this really about?” Typically, however, when the final poem is much shorter than the drafts, the images stay in the DNA; I think the image system serves the poem, but almost like a ghost. I end up refracting the end through it.
BTR: I can totally see that function: the ghost of the image system as a vehicle to get the poem to where it wants to go.
FM: Yeah, and it was very exciting in this case to realize that, in a way, the final image was the most intimate image. It was the image that was closest to me, to my memory, to meaning, the most sacred image I had. I don't know if it's always like that, but in this case, I was happy that the thing that made it at the end was the truest thing.
BTR: Was there anything else about the revision process for “Lullaby” that you would want people to know?
FM: The final draft at the end of the progress document that I sent to you was as close to a solid draft that I could get. When I reached this end, I was feeling a little frustrated. And then I opened a whole new document and wrote the poem as it's been published. So, this document almost served as a pre-thinking. And when it clicked, it totally clicked. It felt like a risk to abandon all of it, but then as soon as it happened, I said, oh, this is it. There's the music, there's the beat. If I ever want to try something radical, I'll always open a whole new document, and it helps me to see these not as drafts, but as experiments. An opportunity for me to try a new version of the poem, one to which I don't have to be wedded. Most of the time, if I let myself have that kind of playful permission, it ends up being much better for me—and for the poem.
Francisco Márquez is a Venezuelan poet with work in The Yale Review, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, and The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, UCross, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he lives in Brooklyn.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.