The Power of The Paraphrase

This article is for: Everyone!

As poets, we’re often told to Show, Not Tell—and this is generally very good advice.

Indeed I think the ability to “show,” using all the tools of poetry from sound to form to meaning, is pretty what poetry is. For that reason, I regularly comment how to do more showing in my feedback to the poets I work with.

But there is one time in your drafting process when it’s OK to tell everything and show nothing: when you’re paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing—by which I mean just writing down exactly what you mean to convey in your poem—can be extremely useful when you’re working on a complex poem and you’ve gotten stuck, lost, or confused.

It’s a tool that can pull you out of the mire, wipe off your glasses, and get you marching the right way again—just by writing down what you’re trying to say!

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Showing is great—until it isn’t

Showing in poetry tends to mean using images and hints, rather than stating or explaining. These images and hint speak more powerfully to readers than us explaining things, and so it’s a good idea to keep using them as the main building blocks of our poems.

But these images and hints can lead to trouble, when we aren’t quite sure what we want to say with them!

Maybe you knew what you wanted them to say at first, but after 20+ drafts, you’ve kind of forgotten.
Or maybe you never really knew in the first place—all those hints and images just sounded good, so you put them all in and hoped your readers would come up with their own brilliant meanings for them! (I have definitely been guilty of this, many times.)

Whatever the cause, it’s easy to get to a place where you have these images, and you don’t quite know what you mean.

And it’s very hard to make good changes to a draft when you don’t know where you’re at now and what you’re aiming for.

Write down what you meant to say

This is where paraphrasing comes in, to clear up everything and even give you new ideas too.

Here’s how to do it.

Print out your poem, and down the side of the text, write a paraphrase of what exactly you mean to be saying at each point in the poem.
Don’t try to make it clever or artful: just say it as plainly as you can. (No one is going to see these words but you.)
As you go, you may find yourself wanting to add new thoughts to your paraphrase—to say things that aren’t in the poem (yet). Let this happen— follow a train of thought as far as it will take you. When it runs out, get back to paraphrasing the actual poem.

Here’s an example from a draft of one of my poems. The paraphrase is in blue, and you probably can’t read it, but I can tell you that there are three places where the paraphrase contains meanings that were not in the original draft at all.

And that’s it! Nothing fancy involved—but it can have very powerful benefits for your drafting.

Why paraphrasing helps

It gives you clarity—and honesty

The first thing paraphrasing does is help you clarify exactly what it is you’re saying at each point in the poem.

No more head scratching and brain fog! The ideas you’re trying to show will come out crystal clear.

And if they don’t come out clear—if your paraphrase is confused, or you can’t even figure out what to write in it—that tells you that your ideas need some work! You’re trying to impress your reader by sounding smart without really knowing what you’re talking about, and that is very unlikely to work.

So, paraphrasing is like a window on your thoughts: it shows you what you’ve got, and when you’re trying to cheat!

It makes the progression of ideas stand out

One particular area of clarity that paraphrasing is great for is the order and sequence of your ideas.

When these ideas come as a series of images and hints, it’s not always possible to tell if the order they’re in makes sense.

But when you paraphrase, in the most direct language you can use, you have a much better chance of seeing when your order is wrong—when you’re saying something illogical, or saying it twice, or going back on yourself, and so on.

Then you can rearrange your images and hints to make the progression of ideas smoother and the poem more powerful.

It gives you new ideas

As I said above, when you’re paraphrasing, you’ll probably find yourself creating new thoughts that weren’t in the draft.

This is great! It means that your creative mind has spotted a gap in the content of your poem, and is trying to fill it.

Or, it may mean that you’ve seen a new direction that the poem could go in, that you hadn’t explored before.

Either way, the paraphrase is helping you out. Take the new ideas that you’ve got, and turn them into images and hints. Then try putting these new images and hints back into the poem, and see how they fit.

These new parts may be just finessing the edges of the poem, or they may start to take it in a radically new direction. If they latter, try to be prepared to abandon your original conception of the poem, and give the new one a go. It may well turn out to be stronger, since your creative mind has had longer to chew on the topic and come up with good material.

Language from the paraphrase may make it into the poem itself

I said earlier that no one but you was going to see the words you use in the paraphrase—but that’s not always true!

Sometimes language from the paraphrase can be useful in the poem.

Maybe it clarifies something that was muddy in the original images and hints, for example.

Or maybe parts of the paraphrase language actually work as showing when you isolate them.

Either way, it’s not unusual to end up drawing parts of the paraphrase into the next draft, and the poem is stronger for it.

So next time you’re stuck…

…try writing a paraphrase!

Next Steps

Take a poem draft that you’re having trouble with, print it out, and write a paraphrase of it down one side of the paper.
Type the paraphrase into your computer.
When you read the paraphrase by itself, what do you notice?
Do the ideas make sense?
Do you repeat yourself?
Are there weird jumps or changes that don’t seem motivated?
Can you think of other ideas that would also fit in?
Use what you’ve noticed to guide you into a next draft of your poem.