Revision: an important phase of poetry writing

After I write a poem and deem it finished, very often there comes a time, early on, or even years or decades later, that I feel the need to revise it. 

Feedback from my fellow poets, family and friends is a major factor for revision. Revisiting any so called “finished” poems, especially with the passage of time, is something I know other poets do, too. I find that creative people, in general, are ever-honing their craft, no matter what the craft is.

For me, revision is also important to the process of submitting poems for publication, especially if I want the poems to better fit publishers’ themes for upcoming anthologies or a regular print (or on- line) issues. In those instances, the poems may simply require minor tweaking, or they may possess only a kernel of something associated with the theme and, therefore, need major revision to meet the criteria. In the latter scenario, the really good thing about that is, because major revision can mean rewriting the entire poem, that will invariably jump-start me writing again, if I happen to be suffering an occasional “writer’s block.”  And, who can knock that?

To recap, below are some key reasons I revise:

 1. to better a poem — the way it reads, the way it sounds when read  out loud

2. to better adapt a poem to fit a specific publication’s submission guidelines, such as mentioned above: could be a theme, such as “Birds of Prey” or a particular “time of year” or specific “locale”

or it could be dictated that the poem(s) be written by a female

or a specific race of poet, or written in the “1^st person or the 3^rd person(“I am” “She is”) or even, in the extreme, written by a specific sexual-identity poet

3. to experiment — to see how the poem can evolve, I’ll change the speaker to the 1^st person,if it’s in the 3^rd, or vice versa; and/or, I’ll change the prevalent “tense” of the poem to the “present” if it had been the “past,” or vice versa;  perhaps, I’ll interweave “past” and “present” so the timeline more easily and interestingly threads its way through the poem

 4. to correct misrepresentation or to clarify — either because specific content proved to be invalid and/or misleading or unclear, upon my rereading and analyzing, or perhaps someone called my attention to certain things they felt needed better explanation    or some clarification          

Please stay on topic with your comments. Off topics comments may be removed. Thanks.

Too many characters in your comment. Required
Characters Remaining: Your comment is too long. Please revise. Thanks.

Type the characters you see