The drafts live in a banker's box on Tomasz Wren's kitchen table in Milwaukee. Each one is numbered in pencil in the upper right corner. Some are typed. Most are handwritten on whatever was nearby, including the backs of hospital parking stubs, a cafeteria receipt for a bowl of tomato soup, and a lesson plan on the past perfect tense. Number 212 is on a clean sheet of printer paper. It is the only draft with no crossings-out.
"Wren, February" is the sonnet that closes A Grammar of Small Birds, Wren's first collection, published in April by Finch & Quill. He wrote the book over a single winter while his wife, Agata, recovered in a hospital room whose window looked out on a stand of bare lilacs. She came home in March. The birds in the lilacs are in nearly every poem.
"I sat in that chair for eleven weeks," Wren said. "I could not help her. I could not help the doctors. The only useful thing I could do was pay attention to something."
Draft 1, the poem he would have written anyway
The first draft is dated January 9. It is earnest, and it is overdressed. It opens with an apostrophe to the bird.
"O wren, O brown and trembling ounce of grace, / you pour your song against the frozen glass."
Wren winced when I read the line aloud. "That is the poem I would have written if nothing had happened to me," he said. "It is a poem about a bird. Birds are very easy to write about badly."
Drafts 2 through roughly 60 stay in this register. The bird is "patient" in eleven of them and "brave" in nine. The word "grace" appears in thirty-four. The rhymes are tidy and the meter is correct, and the speaker is almost entirely absent. Reading them in sequence feels like watching someone stand very politely outside a door.
Draft 94, the bird disappears
Something breaks in the 80s. The meter loosens. Lines get shorter. Then, in draft 94, dated February 3, the wren is gone.
"The nurse says numbers. You say nothing yet. / I learn the names of every tube by heart."
For the next thirty-one drafts there is no bird in the poem at all. The "you" has shifted from the wren to his wife. The window is still there, but nobody looks out of it.
"I took the bird out because I thought it was a coward's trick," Wren said. "Looking at a bird so I wouldn't have to look at her. I was angry at the poem for being pretty."
These drafts are the hardest to read. They are also, line for line, some of the strongest writing in the box, and Wren knows it. A few phrases from this stretch survive into other poems in the collection. But none of the thirty-one drafts works as an ending. They are too close to the bed.
"The poem needed the bird and it needed her, and for a long time I thought I had to choose."
Draft 212, both at once
The wren flies back into the poem in draft 126. From there the work becomes a slow negotiation between the window and the bed, the bird and the woman, the thing he could watch and the thing he could not fix. By draft 180 the sonnet has its final shape. The last thirty-two drafts are almost entirely single-word changes. In several cases he changes a word and then, two drafts later, changes it back.
"That is how you know it is finished," he said. "You start arguing with yourself in circles."
The final version opens small. "It weighs less than the letter that I wrote." It ends on a couplet that quietly rejects the vocabulary of the first draft.
"The wren came back. I did not call it grace. / I called it Tuesday. Then I called your name."
"Grace," the word that appeared thirty-four times in the early drafts, appears once in the final poem, and only to be turned away. The bird is not a symbol anymore. It is a bird that showed up on a Tuesday. The name at the end belongs to someone who is going to answer.
A second language, used carefully
Wren was born in Gdansk and has taught English as a second language in Milwaukee for nineteen years. He thinks that is part of why he could not stop revising.
"I teach people to say what they mean in a language that is not theirs," he said. "English is still not quite mine. That helps me. I cannot be lazy with it. Every word I have to go and get."
Agata has read all 212 drafts. She has a favorite, and it is not the last one. It is number 57, which Wren considers one of the worst in the box. She likes it, she told him, because it was the one he was writing on the day the doctors said she could go home.
A Grammar of Small Birds by Tomasz Wren (Finch & Quill, 112 pages, $16) is out now.
Critic. Elena writes reviews and essays on poetry, memoir and the craft of the first book.
