Your poem isn’t wrong. Also, your poem isn’t perfect.  

Good news: you’re not here to ‘fix’ what’s ‘wrong’ with it, and you’re not here to make it ‘perfect.’ 

You’re not even here to make your poem ‘better,’ because what if the poem wants to be bad? What if the poem wants to be wrong? Ah, so it’s about tuning into what the poem wants, what the poem is doing. 

This isn’t editing, this process shouldn’t be boring. Instead, it’s a creative act, a part of poetry, not separate from it. Re-visioning is about seeing again, looking at a draft you’ve already written and asking:  

How can I help this poem become more of what it wants to be? 

Most of the time you won’t know the answer to that question before you start working. So, start working and figure it out as you go, just like when you’re freewriting. Here are some techniques to try: 

1. Re-read your work and underline the line that sticks out to you the most. This is likely a center of the poem, around which the rest of the poem is in orbit. Notice this. 
2. When we’re freewriting it often takes us awhile to warm up, to get going, to hit on something that we need to write. So, try ‘chopping the head off the poem,’ meaning: see what happens if you cut the early lines where you were still figuring it out. Maybe move them to later in the poem, maybe they aren’t really needed at all.  
3. What if the line you underlined became the first line of the poem? Try it and see what happens.  
4. In any case, you want your first line to be surprising, bold, outrageous, you want that first line to zing because the first line is what pulls the reader in to continue reading. Some of the best first lines are like little explosions, or at least like the lighting of a fuse... woah what?!, the reader asks themselves, how can that be true? What is going to happen here? 
5. One of my best early poetry mentors was Jim Simmerman. He said every line of a poem should be a poem in itself. Like if you were to take a line from your poem and spray paint it on a wall, would it read as poetry? Would there be something of interest in it? Would someone recognize it as having been written by you? Play with breaking your lines in different places and adding sensory language. 
6. Remember poems don’t need to be written in complete sentences, they don’t need to be complete stories. What words are pulling their weight, adding life and color and uniqueness to your poem? Which words and phrases are just there to connect, for grammar or convention? Try cutting all uses of the verb ‘to be:’ is, was, were, etc. Try using fewer common words. Try making your poem stranger.  

Imagine you are sharpening your poem. Imagine you are a sculptor, chipping away the pieces of the rock that don’t need to be there. Imagine you are a painter, adding more paint to make your piece bolder, brighter.  

Make it fierce and beautiful. Make it yours, because you’re the only one who can write it.  

This blog post was shared by Logan Phillips, one of our Writing the Community partners.