I’m developing a close personal relationship with Petit Verdot. Specifically, our 3/4 ton that’s fermenting right now.

Each morning this week, I’ve driven in the early rainy dark to the winery to punch down the grapes. While the yeast eat the grape sugar and make alcohol, they release carbon dioxide, which pushes the berries and skins up to make a cap on the surface (think of a thick grape carpet). Every 12 hours, that cap needs to be punched down–broken up and submerged. But it rises back up fast. It heaves and roils.

The fermentation is like a living thing–it is a living thing. And it’s a hybrid creature–part vegetable (the grapes) and part animal (the yeast). It feels like a miracle.

I take its temperature and measure the sugar levels (the brix) to see how the fermentation’s going. We wait until the brix drop far enough that we can press the juice off the skins. We wait.

How is this like writing?

We’ve all heard the common and very good advice to let your writing rest–let it ferment, wait to look at it.

But writing, especially a poem, is also like that hybrid creature. At first, it might be animal or vegetable or mineral–or any combination. The trick I think is to avoid making it one or the other too soon, fitting it into the label, the direction or outcome or form we think it should be.

Sometimes, I want to understand what I’m doing, bottle it up and feel confident it’s done. The Petit Verdot’s reminding me to resist that urge, to let the poem become its own magic.

Something to consider the next time you enjoy a glass of wine.

Happy Friday!

Yesterday, we crushed Friday’s haul.

I walked into the shop/winery, and saw one bin suspended.

Tom has figured out optimum ergonomics. By sliding a second bin underneath, he gets the bin to a comfortable height for sorting and bucketing fruit.

And that’s what we do–sort and bucket, and then into the destemmer-crusher.

Then working with the results. Here’s Daniel working with the crushed berries.

Wine is a process. After this, pitching yeast, fermentation (including punch-down every 12 hours), pressing, racking, and a lot of other steps I don’t know about yet.

Poetry can be a process, too.

I admit that I have been unhappy with the poems–or drafts of poems–that I wrote in September. But I still want the idea from those poems, if I can find it. I still want the poems that I was trying to write.

And so I’m trying to write poems ”that seem like they wrote themselves” by using process–the draft, printing, writing on the printed pages, adding the rewrites, and then starting over. And I want to create a chapbook that’s all of a piece–so I’m trying to work on all the poems at the same time, hoping that each individual poem teaches me about the whole project and adds cohesion (without becoming a cookie-cutter result–which is best saved for cookies). I have a few months to meet my self-imposed deadline.

By then, all this good becoming-wine should be pressed and into barrels.

How do you bring a poem from idea to completion?

What’s your process? And do you change that process every time? Or when you’re writing a series of poems?