Poetry Workshop Facilitator

Workshop Notes: "My Father's Tomatoes"

Your goals are clear, so I'll go straight into the workshop.

1. First Impression

This poem is about how grief passes through the body. The speaker inherits a gesture, a posture, and a piece of ground before he understands any of it. The strongest line is "tying the vines to stakes with strips of old pantyhose." It is specific, a little funny, thrifty, and quietly implies a whole household (whose pantyhose?). It's the kind of detail only someone who was there would know. Close behind it is "though I don't know the rows," which holds more grief in six plain words than anything in the final stanza.

2. Technical Craft

What's working:

• Rhythm: Your opening line has a lovely rocking, anapestic lilt ("Every JU-ly he KNELT in the DIRT like a MAN at PRAY-er"). That rhythm suits kneeling and repetition.
• Sound: "I pick one and it splits warm juice across my palm" has real mouth-feel. The hard p/k/t sounds give way to the soft oo and m, so the line bursts and then softens the way the tomato does. "Tomato cages rusting, leaning" also works: the matching -ing participles make the cages sound like they're still slowly moving.
• Stanza-crossing enjambment: Twice you run a sentence across a stanza break ("I don't know the rows, / and the tomatoes…" and "when the day is done / and I kneel…"). This is your best structural instinct. It makes the poem feel like one continuous act of memory rather than five separate boxes.

Where the music fights the meaning:

The rhyme is choosing your words for you. You described the form as "loose rhyming quatrains," but the rhymes are actually tight ABAB throughout. Look at which words land on the rhymes:

Nearly every time the rhyme is forced, the filler word is an abstraction. Your concrete instincts (pantyhose, hoe, rows, rust) are strong. The rhyme scheme keeps pulling you toward vague emotional nouns to complete the chime. That is the main technical reason the poem drifts toward sentiment.

The line breaks are almost all end-stopped. Nearly every line ends at a comma or period, so the breaks only mark the rhymes. A line break can do more: it can create a pause, a double meaning, or a small enactment. Compare:

I pick one and it splits warm juice across my palm,

I pick one and it splits warm juice across my palm.

In the second version the line itself splits. The reader's eye drops through white space the way the juice drops, and "splits" hangs for a moment as a word about more than tomatoes.

A tricolon habit. You reach for groups of three: "so sure, so brown, so full of quiet care" and "like summer, like time, like a work of art." In both cases the list escalates toward abstraction, so each item gets vaguer. Lists work best when they escalate toward the specific.

3. Imagery & Language

What's working: Your concrete nouns are excellent and specific to this father: pantyhose, stakes, hoe, cages, weeds. His dialogue, "the soil don't lie, boy, you get what you give," is the best voice in the poem. The grammar ("don't") and the address ("boy") give him more life than any adjective could.

Clichés and filler to address:

• "red as a broken heart": You're right, this is a cliché. It's also redundant, because the tomato literally splits two lines later. The image already carries the metaphor, and the simile announces it in advance.
• "like a work of art": This exists to rhyme with "heart." It also says nothing a reader can taste.
• "so full of quiet care": This tells us the hands were caring. The pantyhose line already showed that care.
• "something in me breaks and something else stays calm": This is a neat paradox with no picture in it. The reader can't see or feel it.
• "when the day is done," "let the whole thing pass": These are stock phrases filling out the meter.
• "I feel his hands guiding my hands": This is the ghost-hands trope. It's close to something true (inheritance through the body), but it's stated in the most familiar way possible.
• "like a man at prayer": This is a borderline case. The simile itself is common, but it earns its place as a refrain, which I'll come back to.

A symbol you may not have noticed: The father's saying, you get what you give, is transactional, almost stern. Then stanza four shows the garden "half gone to weeds." The soil isn't lying. The weeds are the honest record of the speaker's absence or grief. That is a far more complicated and moving idea than "love is everywhere," and it's already in your draft.

4. Emotional Arc & Voice

What's working: The shape is sound. Present (kneeling) → memory (father's hands) → sensation (the tomato) → the father's words → present decay → return to kneeling. Bringing back the opening line is the right instinct, because it frames the poem like the speaker circling back to the same spot of ground.

Where it falters: The poem stops trusting its images in two places.

1. Stanza 3 explains the father's saying. "I didn't understand that then. Now I know / that love was the water…" translates his wonderfully blunt line into a greeting-card line. His version is better.
2. The final stanza ends four times. "I feel his hands…" / "I know…" / "love is everywhere" / "I understand at last, I understand." Each one tells us the grief has been resolved. The poem is about grief that isn't resolved, a speaker who "doesn't know the rows," so claiming total understanding contradicts the poem's own truth.

On the returning refrain: When a line comes back, it should mean something different the second time, as in a villanelle, where the refrain gets heavier with each return. Right now "like a man at prayer" returns unchanged, so it closes the loop without deepening it.

On knowing when a poem is finished: One useful test is to go line by line and ask, "Is this here because it's true, or because it rhymes or explains?" When you can't find a line that exists only to rhyme or explain, you're close.

5. Targeted Revisions

Revision 1: Plant the ending in the first stanza

• Original: "his hands so sure, so brown, so full of quiet care."
• Revision: "his thumbs working knots he never had to look at."
• Why: This swaps a stated feeling for a specific physical skill, which sets up the muscle-memory ending in Revision 5.

Revision 2: Let the tomato carry the heartbreak

• Original:

  and the tomatoes hang heavy, red as a broken heart. I pick one and it splits warm juice across my palm, tasting like summer, like time, like a work of art— something in me breaks and something else stays calm.

• Revision:

  and the tomatoes hang heavy, some already split. I pick one and it opens warm across my palm. I eat it standing, the way he did, without the salt he kept in his shirt pocket for this.

• Why: The missing salt shaker makes the father's absence something the reader can taste, and it replaces three abstractions ("heart," "art," "calm") with one concrete loss.

Revision 3: Trust the father's voice

• Original: "I didn't understand that then. Now I know / that love was the water, and love was how things live."
• Revision: "I was twelve. I thought he meant the tomatoes."
• Why: This implies the speaker now understands a larger meaning without stating it, so the reader completes the thought. That is how an ending is earned rather than delivered.

Revision 4: Sharpen the return to the garden

• Original: "I could let it go, let the whole thing pass, / but some nights I go out when the day is done"
• Revision: "The soil don't lie. / Some nights, after the dishes, I go out with a flashlight"
• Why: Repeating the father's words over the weeds turns his saying into a quiet self-accusation, and "flashlight" and "dishes" replace the stock phrase "when the day is done" with a real scene.

Revision 5: Change the refrain and end on a gesture

• Original:

  and I kneel in the dirt like a man at prayer, and I swear I feel his hands guiding my hands, and I know, in the end, love is everywhere, and I understand at last, I understand.

• Revision:

  and I kneel in the dirt like a man at prayer who has forgotten the words, and tie up what's left of the vines with strips of his work shirts, my hands making a knot I never learned.

• Why: The refrain now carries loss ("forgotten the words" echoes "I don't know the rows"). Tearing up his shirts turns inheritance into a literal act, and "a knot I never learned" shows the father living on in the speaker's body without saying so.

Note that these revisions loosen or drop the rhyme. If you want to keep some chime, try slant rhyme (split/this, words/learned, prayer/shirts). It gives the ear an echo without letting the rhyme dictate your words.

One Next Step

Rewrite only the final stanza, and ban these words: love, know, understand, feel, heart, everywhere. Your ending must land on a physical action or object. This is the single change that will most transform the poem, because the last lines teach the reader how to reread everything before them.

Exercise: "The Object Instead" (20 minutes)

1. Write the sentence you want the reader to feel at the end, e.g., "I finally understand my father's love." Then put it away. It's for you, not the poem.
2. List 15 concrete things connected to your father and the garden: tools, clothing, sounds, smells, habits, phrases. Push past the obvious ones. Items 11–15 are usually where the best material appears.
3. Draft three different four-line endings, each closing on a different item from your list. None may use a banned word.
4. Read each ending aloud after the rest of the poem. Choose the one that makes you feel the sentence from step 1 without saying it.

Practice this on other poems too. Before you end any poem, ask what object or action could carry the feeling instead of naming it. Over time this becomes your answer to "is it finished?": a poem often ends when you've found the image that makes the explanation unnecessary.

You already have the eye for pantyhose and rusting cages. The work now is trusting those images enough to let them have the last word.