When to Revise a Poem and When to Burn It and Start Over

The hardest revision question is not how to fix a poem; it is whether the poem can be fixed at all. A judge on the three signs a poem needs revision, the three signs it needs a rewrite, and the one question that tells you which.

Every poet has a drawer of poems that are almost good. The poem that is close but not there, the one that has a real moment buried under a bad structure, the one that could be fixed if you could just figure out how. The hardest revision question is not how to fix it. It is whether it can be fixed at all.

I have revised a hundred poems and I have burned a hundred more, and the difference between the two is a single question that I ask before I touch a line.

The three signs a poem needs revision

Sign one: the poem has a real moment. If there is a line or an image or a turn in the poem that is genuinely yours, something only you could have written, the poem is worth saving. The moment is the seed; the revision is the work.

Sign two: the problem is the surface. If the poem is failing because of a bad rhyme, a clunky line, a stanza that is too long, the problem is fixable. The surface is the part you can cut and polish and rearrange without losing the heart.

Sign three: the poem knows what it is. If the poem has a subject and a voice and a shape, even if they are not working, the poem has a skeleton. Revision is the work of putting the flesh on the bones.

The three signs a poem needs a rewrite

Sign one: the poem has no moment. If you read the poem and there is no line that is genuinely yours, no image that is real, no turn that lands, the poem is not a poem yet. It is a sketch, and sketches do not get revised; they get thrown out.

Sign two: the problem is the heart. If the poem is failing because the subject is wrong, the voice is fake, the thing it is trying to say is not the thing it should be saying, the problem is not the surface. It is the heart, and the heart cannot be edited; it can only be rewritten.

Sign three: the poem does not know what it is. If you read the poem and you cannot say what it is about in one sentence, the poem is not a poem. It is a collection of lines that have not found their subject yet.

The one question that decides

Here is the question I ask before I touch a poem: is the poem worth saving because of what it is, or because of what it could be? If the answer is what it could be, it needs a rewrite. If the answer is what it is, it needs a revision.

The poem that is worth saving is the one that has a real moment in it, a line or an image that is genuinely yours. The poem that needs a rewrite is the one that is a sketch of a poem that does not exist yet.

Where the revision goes wrong

The trap is the poem that is revised when it should be rewritten. The poet spends months polishing a poem that has no heart, and the polish is the thing that makes the heartlessness visible. The poem that has no moment is not a poem; it is a drawing of a poem, and you cannot edit a drawing into a painting.

If you want to see the difference between a poem that has a moment and one that does not, the editing checklist has the cut list, and the contest window is open when the revision is done. Revision is the craft. Rewrite is the courage.

Keep reading

For the craft side, the contest-tips module covers the deeper method. The past winners is the page to read next, and the current window is where the work goes when it is done.

By Writory Editorial, for Writory.

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