The Poem of Restraint

Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle · Self-Paced Workshop

Format. Work on your own timeline. Plan on 2–3 hours over at least two sittings. Come to the virtual debrief with a finished or near-finished poem, a note naming the feeling it carries, and your answer to Self-Edit question 2, which is your question for the group.

The live virtual meet-up for this workshop will be on October 28 at 7 PM. Registrants will receive the link in an email a few days before and you may send work to shareat that meeting via an attachment in a reply to that email.

1. The Frame

Restraint isn’t the absence of feeling. It’s feeling with the commentary removed. A poem can be devastating, funny, or tender and say almost nothing directly.

Grief is the obvious place to practice, but the skill works on any strong feeling: a joy you couldn’t say out loud, anger you swallowed, tenderness between people who don’t speak of it, a small shame, a joke told deadpan. This workshop trains your ear to hear when a line is feeling on the reader’s behalf and when it trusts the reader to feel. Restraint is one mode among many, so treat it as a skill to have rather than a rule for every poem.

2. Model Poems

Read at least three, all five if you can. One of them (Hayden) names the feeling outright near the end; read it as a test of when naming works. Read each twice: once for the whole, once slowly, marking the line where the poet chose silence over statement.

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”: guilt, teasing, and tenderness, all in the form of a note on the icebox.
Charles Simic, “Fork”: an ordinary fork described in the language of horror, with a straight face. The dread and the comedy both come from a voice that never reacts.
Ron Koertge, “First Grade”: the dismay of a first day at school, carried by contrast: wolves and snowshoes on one side, a woman with gray breath and rows of little desks on the other. Where does it come closest to telling us?
Ted Kooser, “Abandoned Farmhouse”: a family’s story told by what’s left behind, with no one explaining what went wrong.
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”: tenderness and regret carried by cold rooms and polished shoes, until the last lines name love as a question. Does the naming earn its place?

For each poem, jot a few words: What feeling is it carrying, and what carries it? Where does it almost tell us how to feel, and doesn’t? Which line chooses the image over the explanation? (For Hayden: where does it say the thing, and what earns that?)

3. Three Restraint Mechanisms

Cut the abstraction. Where an emotion word appears, replace it with the concrete image that would get the reader there on their own. (See Koertge and Kooser.)
Stop mid-gesture. End on an action or object in motion, or a sensation, not a summary. The poem stops; it doesn’t conclude. (See Williams and Koertge.)
Withhold the antecedent. Leave “you,” “she,” or the event unnamed, and let the scene carry what exposition would. (See Kooser and Williams.)

Watch for:

Stock objects. The empty chair and the unworn shoes are the usual traps. The image has to belong to this scene.
Withholding too much. If the reader has no way in, that’s coyness, not restraint.
Nothing to withhold. Restraint needs pressure. Choose a feeling strong enough that leaving it unsaid costs something.
Displacement. Kooser hangs a feeling word on a thing (a lonely road) rather than a person. Study it as a move, not a loophole for your draft.

4. The Writing Prompt

Write a poem about a feeling you would rather show than say. It can be loss, but it doesn’t have to be. Choose a memory or moment that still has heat: a joy you couldn’t say out loud, anger you swallowed, tenderness between people who don’t speak of it, being half inside a group, a small shame, gratitude, or something funny told deadpan.

Don’t use: feel, felt, gone, miss, remember, love (or loved, beloved), grief, alone, or any word that names a feeling directly (happy, angry, proud, ashamed, grateful, tender, sad, and so on). The first five are summary words that announce the feeling or the loss. The rest name it outright. Published poems break these rules (Hayden’s names “love” in its last lines); they’re training constraints for your draft.
Carry every emotional beat with an object, an action, or a physical detail. For a comic poem, let the deadpan carry it and don’t signal that it’s funny. (See Simic.)
Length: 15 lines maximum, with 12 as the target. For prose forms (haibun, flash), about 100 words. The shorter the poem, the harder it is to hide behind ornament.
Find one moment where you wanted to explain, and cut the explanation. Keep that sentence in a note. It’s your Self-Edit question 2 material, and you don’t read it aloud.
Two sittings minimum: draft, set it aside, come back and cut.

5. Self-Edit Pass

First, on a scrap of paper, write the feeling your poem is carrying. Keep it private until the debrief. Then read the poem aloud once, mark where your voice wants to explain, and ask:

Image or explanation? Does the poem trust the image? Does the ending land on something specific and physical, or does it summarize?
Where is less more? Name the exact word or line that could go. Bring this to the debrief.
Too much cut? Where would one more concrete detail let the reader in?
Risk. Is there a leap or a gap in the scene that’s earned rather than confusing?

6. Virtual Debrief

Plan on about 6 minutes per poet.

Read aloud, unmuted, with no preamble. Hold about ten seconds of silence afterward before anyone speaks.
Name the feeling. Each listener offers a word or two for the feeling they heard. Then the writer shares their scrap of paper.
Group response, brief and observational: one place the image did the work, and one place you felt the poem almost explain, or where the silence went too heavy.
The writer names their Self-Edit answer #2, and may share the sentence they cut. The group weighs in.

Ground rule: observations, not edits. Drafts stay closed. A gap between the feeling the writer meant and the feeling the group heard isn’t a failure on either side; it’s what the debrief is for. The point is reflection and sharing the cuts you made, not group-edited drafting.