THE NOTEBOOK | No. 2
Focus: Educational Resources & Workshop Materials
A Workshop On Shoring A Stanza
Purpose. Learn to tell furniture from structure. Leave with one cut and one new line break they can defend.
Materials. Copies of the two versions below. Blank paper. A draft each student brought (8–20 lines).
Do not. Think about what the poem “means.” Instead: Think about what each line is doing once you are inside.
Shoring, not polish
Polish changes the finish: a prettier noun, a softer verb, a smoother ear.
Shoring changes what the finish is attached to.
Once you are inside the stanza, niceness is decoration. Ask four questions of every line:
Which line is the wall?
Which line is furniture you could remove without the room falling?
Where is the reader allowed to rest?
Does the last line hold the stanza, or does it explain the stanza?
Rule for today. You may cut. You may break a line in a new place. You may not add decoration.
Version A (student draft)
After the long funeral I drove home
and dropped my keys into the small bowl
by the door like I always do.
The house felt so empty and quiet.
I thought about calling my sister
to tell her I made it back okay
but I didn’t pick up the phone.
I just stood there in the kitchen.
Version B (shored)
After the funeral I drove home
and dropped my keys in the bowl
by the door. The house was quiet.
I did not call my sister.
Annotated draft
What was cut, and why
After the long funeral I drove home
Cut long. The word asks for pity before the room exists. “Funeral” already does the work.
and dropped my keys into the small bowl
Cut small. Size of the bowl is furniture. The action is the wall: keys leave the hand.
by the door like I always do.
Cut like I always do. Habit told is weaker than habit shown. Keys in the bowl is the habit. The clause explains what the image already holds.
The house felt so empty and quiet.
Cut felt so empty and. “Empty” names the feeling. “Quiet” is the interval in which a call could occur. Keep the interval. Cut the label.
I thought about calling my sister
to tell her I made it back okay
Cut both lines. They narrate an intention the last line will refuse. If the refusal is the structure, the intention is a prior summary. The reader does not need to watch someone think about a call in order to feel the call that does not happen.
but I didn’t pick up the phone.
I just stood there in the kitchen.
Cut the kitchen tableau and the “just.” Standing is a pose. The unmade call is the thing the stanza was built to hold. Move the sister into the last line so the refusal has a person in it.
The new break after quiet.
The white space is not mood. It is time. The reader rests there, inside the house, before the refusal arrives. Without that rest, “I did not call my sister” is a caption. With it, the line is a door that does not open.
Why Version B is not brighter.
No image was improved. A joint was made visible. That is shoring.
Sequence
The room
Read the four questions aloud. No discussion yet.
Two versions, no theory
Read Version A once. Read Version B once. Students mark, on A, one line they would keep at all costs and one line they would take out. They do not share.
Diagnose A
Name the wall, name the furniture, name the rest. Then show Version B. Ask only: what job does the gap after quiet now do? Keep this to five voices. Stop before theme.
Floor plan
Draw the floor plan of this stanza.
One box per line.
Label each box WALL, FURNITURE, or REST.
Draw an arrow to the line the stanza cannot lose.
If two boxes do the same job, one of them can go.
Fiction variant, same clock: draw the floor plan of a scene. One box per beat. Same labels.
Apply
Open your own draft. Do two things, no more:
Cut one line that explains a line that already exists.
Move one break so the reader rests before the line that holds the poem.
They write the old pair and the new pair on the same page, nothing else.
One joint
Read the old last two lines and the new last two lines.
Close, one sentence you can say:
Polish asks whether the language is nice. Shoring asks whether the structure can be occupied.
Durable exercise
Rebuild from the last line backward
Use this next time, or as an exercise.
Copy the last line of the draft at the top of a blank page.
That line is now the wall. Everything above it must earn the right to remain.
Write backward, line by line, toward the first line. Each new line may only do one of three jobs: deliver the reader to the wall, give the reader a place to rest, or go.
If a line tells the reader what the last line will do, cut it.
Stop when the first line is a door into the room, not a sign outside it.
Product: a stanza whose last line is no longer a summary.
