Poetry-Writing Tips: The Rewrite

No matter how seasoned a veteran you may be at writing poetry, editing your work is an inescapable part of the poetic process if you want to produce high quality work. One of the most profitable ways of editing your poetry to achieve the best results is to actually rewrite it.

There are different ways of going about reworking your poetry through a rewrite. Some poets read through their poem out loud, looking for only those "trouble spots" where the "flow" of the poem seems interrupted, and they start their rewrites there. Other poets simply choose to rewrite their poem word-for-word, rewriting as they copy to see if the actual act of the rewrite produces new feelings or ideas that may come out on the page as they work. Still others choose to scrap their current piece and start from scratch.

All of the above practices are beneficial ways of getting to the essence of what you really want to convey through your poetry, or any piece of writing for that matter. Revisiting a piece with the amount of attention a rewrite requires, no matter how that rewrite comes about, draws your consideration to areas of your work that may have been easily overlooked during the initial stages of the creative process.

One benefit of starting from scratch is that, with the original poem already impressed on your psyche, the true essence or emotion of the poem, the real intent of the piece, is often clearer to you as the poet than it was during the original piece's creation. This allows you to write more concisely and more to "the point," and since you don't have to work as hard to find all the words you initially broke your back trying to come up with your creative juices will likely flow more fluently.

The cleanness of a blank page also helps to do away with portions of an original piece that may have been bogging the poem down, but which you were to attached to to do away with. Not having those parts of the work on the page to begin with allows you to moved forward without them and avoid the conflicts that were likely holding the previous incarnation of the work back in some way.

If you are one of those poets who fears the murky, hypnotizing whiteness of the blank page and prefers to rework their writing piece-by-piece, that method will work fine as well. The actual method by which you rework your poem is not as important as simply revisiting the piece to hone it down to perfection. Often those poets who prefer to rework their poetry piece-by-piece find they end up revising the entire poem anyway, one new idea leading to another until the poem is unrecognizable in terms of its structural relationship to the original.

Another positive, and sometimes more enjoyable way of reworking a poem is to rewrite it as a form poem. Transitioning a poem that is free verse into, say, a sonnet form, can sometimes focus a poem with its structure. Conversely, transitioning say, a sonnet, from the form into another incarnation can sometimes free the poem from unnatural constrictions that may have been suffocating the piece.

Love it or hate it, editing is an inevitable part of the writing process, and the more time you spend reworking a poem the more satisfied you will likely be with the outcome. Whatever the poem and whoever the poet, the rewrite is a valuable tool for such an essential part of the job.