How to Keep What Lives: On Grades, Small Words, and the Garden I Revised Away
by Bethany Bruno
Image by Courtney Smith
In my college poetry workshops, I learned to fear small words.
Not the loud ones. Not grief, not God, not forever. The small ones that slip in the way breath slips in. Ordinary, unnoticed, until someone tells you they are a problem.
The
Of
That
My professor was the real thing. A published poet with books and awards, and a way of talking about language that made it feel dangerous and exact. She carried a tote full of photocopies and rules. Not mean rules. Not “gotcha” rules. Precision rules. The kind you learn the way you learn to hold a knife.
Early on, she gave us a packet on diction. The paper smelled of toner. The staples sat tight enough to tear the corner if you flipped too fast. Near the top was a list that kept returning in her comments, in workshop, in our heads.
Cut articles. Cut prepositions. Cut “that.” Prefer nouns and verbs. Distrust abstraction. Read your work aloud until it tells on you.
Then the one that lodged in my brain because it sounded so strict it had to be true.
“If you can delete the word the, do it.”
Sometimes she circled the in my drafts and wrote one word in the margin: lazy. Not cruel. Certain. As if the word itself was a shortcut, a way to avoid making a sharper choice.
The first time I turned in poems to be graded, I did not do well. I cannot remember if it was a C or a B. I remember the heat in my face. I remember the sting of realizing I walked into that room thinking I knew what I was doing and got corrected by a letter on a page.
So, I did what a lot of students do when a grade tells them they are getting it wrong.
I followed the rules.
I went home and searched for small words the way you hunt lint. I used Find and typed the. Next: the. Next: the. The cursor hopped from line to line, pointing out my habits. I deleted the. I deleted of. I deleted anything that looked soft. I made the lines leaner. I tried to sound smarter. I tried to sound the way I thought poems were supposed to sound.
And then I started getting A’s.
That’s the part I think about now. Not because grades are evil, but because grades persuade. A grade does not only evaluate a poem. It teaches you what kind of voice earns approval. When my work started getting A’s, the rules stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like the only way in.
If I wanted to be good, I had to write the way she wanted.
It worked. It also changed my relationship to my own poems.
I started revising with a red pen already inside my head. I started hearing her comments before anyone made them. I stopped drafting freely because I cut while I wrote. I could feel myself reaching for the leanest version of a sentence, not the truest.
At the time, I told myself that meant I was learning craft.
Then I wrote a poem about my dad.
He was sick then, in the way sickness rearranges a family without asking permission. During that period, he started gardening. Not as a casual pastime. It became a daily practice, almost devotion. He learned what grew best where. He watched forecasts. He pulled weeds with care. He watered slowly. He tended those plants as if he could keep life steady by keeping the garden steady.
For me, it was personal. The garden felt like a second language, a way for him to live inside his own body again. When I wrote the poem, it came out in the words I actually used. It did not feel polished. It felt true. It felt like something I wanted to keep.
Here’s a section from that first version, the one I brought in with my throat still in it.
Garden poem, original draft:
I watched him walk to the backyard in the early heat,
cup of coffee shaking in his hand.
He knelt by the tomatoes and touched the leaves
as if he could calm them.
The hose made a soft rush, then the click of the nozzle,
water bright as glass on the mulch.
He said, This bed is stubborn, and laughed,
then went quiet, staring at the dirt
as if it might answer back.
I brought it to workshop.
And workshop did what workshop does. People leaned in. People offered suggestions. People circled lines. People told me where the poem slowed, where it got sentimental, where they wanted it to turn harder, where they wanted “more tension,” “more compression,” “a cleaner ending.”
The critique drifted toward my professor’s rules, because her rules were the air we breathed.
Cut the small words. Tighten the diction. Sharpen the images. Remove anything that feels extra.
And because I wanted to keep getting A’s, I did it.
Here’s what that same section became after I obeyed. It is not a bad poem. That’s part of the problem.
Garden poem, revised for workshop:
I watched him walk backyard in early heat,
coffee trembling in hand.
He knelt by tomatoes, touched leaves
as if calming them.
Hose rushed, nozzle clicked,
water glass bright on mulch.
He said, Bed stubborn, laughed,
then went quiet, staring at dirt
waiting for answer.
When I look at the revised version now, I can see what the rule bought me. Speed. Compression. A clean surface. The lines move.
I can also see what it cost. The backyard became generic. The coffee cup lost its shakiness, which was not just a detail, it was the body telling the truth. Even the tender clumsiness of my original syntax mattered because it sounded like me watching him. The revised poem sounds like I am trying to sound poetic.
I also revised it into a poem that did not feel like my dad anymore.
That loss did not announce itself. It arrived quiet. It showed up when I reread the new version and felt nothing in the places that used to hurt. The poem improved according to the rules. It also drifted away from the thing I tried to hold.
I do not blame my professor for that. I do not blame my classmates. I do not even blame the rules.
I blame what happened inside me when the rules became law.
Because I did not revise the poem to serve the poem. I revised it to earn approval.
Here is the thing I can admit now, with more tenderness than I had back then: those rules existed for a reason.
Poets pad. We hedge. We reach for default phrasing when we feel exposed. We hide behind soft constructions and abstract language because it feels safer than being specific. We explain instead of making an image. We add extra words because extra words feel less risky.
When a teacher tells you to cut the and cut of and cut that, she usually points at something real. She tries to get you to notice when your language goes slack.
The rule is not really about the word. It is about attention.
But attention can turn into fear if you are not careful. Because the moment you start asking, “Is this allowed?” you stop asking the question that matters.
What does this choice do?
Here is what I wish someone had told me in that classroom.
The is not always lazy.
Sometimes the is insistence. Sometimes it is intimacy. Sometimes it is the way a speaker points at the exact thing that matters. Not a garden, but the garden. Not a father, but the father whose hands smell of soil.
If you treat the as forbidden, you miss the chance to use it on purpose.
A rule clean version might be:
He knelt in dirt,
pulling weeds,
saving what could live.
A version that lets the mouth speak naturally might be:
He knelt in the dirt,
pulling weeds from the bed,
saving what could live.
Sometimes cutting small words wakes a line up. Sometimes keeping them keeps the line human. The point is not the rule. The point is the effect.
I still use those workshop rules. I just use them differently now.
I draft in my natural language first, without policing myself. Once the draft exists, I do a ruthless pass and cut the padding, the default phrases, the soft spots that are not earning their keep. Sometimes I cut every the just to see what happens.
Then I read aloud and put back what my mouth misses. I put back what restores breath, music, and presence.
Here is the private test I use now:
If I cut the word and the line wakes up, I keep it cut.
If I cut the word and the line loses its pulse, I put it back.
No guilt. No superstition. Just listening.
That is where subjectivity lives, and I do not mean that as a shrug. I mean it as the point of art. For one writer, stripping small words makes the poem fast and clean and electric. For another writer, it makes the poem brittle and less human. Both reactions can be honest.
You decide based on what you want the poem to do.
I think about my dad’s garden whenever I get too rigid about craft.
A garden does not thrive because you obey a list. It thrives because you pay attention. You remove what chokes the bed. You keep what is living. You learn the difference by watching what happens when you change something.
That is what I want from poetry now.
Attention, not compliance.
Choice, not permission.
I am grateful for the rules I learned, because they taught me to revise, to listen, to cut what is dead.
I am also grateful I learned, later, that a poem is not a report card.
The real measure is still embarrassingly simple.
Do I like this poem?
Does it move?
Does it speak?
Does it feel alive?
Does it hold what I meant to hold?
Rules exist for a reason. They can sharpen you. They can save you from your habits.
But the goal is not to write a poem that follows rules.
The goal is to write a poem that lives.
And sometimes the poem lives in the smallest word in the language. The one you were told to delete. The one your mouth reaches for when you are trying to tell the truth.
BETHANY BRUNO is a Floridian author whose fiction and nonfiction often explore history, place, and the strange beauty of Florida. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. She won the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest and the 2026 Key West Art & Historical Society’s Tennessee Williams Short Story Contest. Learn more at bethanybrunowriter.com
