Poetry Writing Tips: Editing

Whether a novice poet new to the task or a seasoned veteran used to the daily grind, one of the most dreaded and necessary tasks that face you as a writer is editing your work. While it may seem like some writers cough up perfection on a whim, the reality of the true poet's work is that it is often the product of laborious effort and a seemingly never-ending refinement of words. Many poets won't hesitate to tell you the hours, days, weeks or even years spent sweating over pages which, while not blank, often present a greater challenge to the creative imagination in honing the script than does the initial filling of the paper with ink. And yet the differences in quality between a painstakingly revisited poem and a first draft are dramatic and often surprising.

Here are some editing tips for those poets who may not know where to begin, or who simply need a refresher between their labors:

Check for Consistency - It may seem obvious, but it never ceases to amaze me how many poems I see, from newbies and veteran writers alike, where the punctuation and capitalization are uneven and seem to be randomly scattered across the page. While some poets claim "artistic" allowances for their scrambled grammatical errors, usually this explanation is nothing more than an excuse for those too lazy to edit their work. Look down the left-hand side of your poem. Are some of the first letters of each line capitalized while others remain lowercase? Unless the uneven capitalization follows proper punctuation, fix it. Read through your poem slowly, making sure to take out extra or misspelled words and adding punctuation where it is obviously needed. Some artistic allowances can be made, but as a general rule, if a reader needs an explanation, often the allowance appears to be more accidental than artistic.

Try Different Points-of-View - If you've written a poem and have gone over and over it and it just seems flat or off somehow, trying different points-of-view can be a way to add new life to the piece and may even surprise you with what you discover in the poem that you may not have noticed before. For example, I wrote a poem once dealing with a young woman who had an abortion that was supposed to be narrated by the would-have-been father. Throughout the poem I referred to the girl in the third person, as "she." Some friends brought it to my attention that I had accidentally written "you" in the place of "she" in one spot, and suggested I change them all so that the references to the girl would be in second person. Once I did so, the poem took on a life of its own, becoming much more striking and personal in the process. No longer was the subject an ambiguous, removed "she," but she was now an intimate of the narrator, a "you."

Rewrite! - If all else fails, start from scratch. If you've gone over a piece again and again and it just doesn't seem to be working, start again and see what pops up. It may just surprise you. Often, especially when an early draft has personal significance or contains certain elements you as the writer are particularly proud of, it can be hard to let things go that may or may not be working as they are. Every poet has had the experience of having "the line," that one perfect line you've built the poem around that you'd just hate to let go. The truth of the matter is sometimes, no matter how good or personal or powerful that line may be, it just doesn't belong in the poem. That doesn't mean the line is no good or that you should forget about it, it just means that maybe you need to save it for another piece. Though thinking about starting a poem from square one may seem intimidating, it is also misleading. In truth, you aren't really starting from nothing - you've had a piece you've gone over and over and over again and likely the essence of what you were trying to say in the poem will be much clearer this time around than it was in the first place.

No matter how pleased you are with a certain poem, or any piece of writing for that matter, the truth is that the piece can always benefit from a second, a third, or fiftieth or even hundredth glance. Many novelists will tell you they will write key portions of a book some thirty times or more before they grudgingly allow its publication, still not fully satisfied with the final product.

There is truth the old saying that a piece of writing is a "skeleton" that needs "fleshing out." It is just as true, however, that sometimes writing can be a fat man that needs to slim down. What it comes down to is that writing is a process, one that often requires hard work to achieve real success. As with anything, writing good poetry takes patience and dedication to the task. I hope these tips will somehow ease the process for you.