Twenty More Tips for Revising Your Poems

1. Don’t belabor your points. Consider saying something only once, using one comparison instead of two, one vivid image instead of a muddy series of images.
2. Try throwing everything into a rough draft, including images that seem almost irrelevant to see if they establish a new and better direction for the poem.
3. Examine what you have so far to see if it could be strengthened by adding related words elsewhere in the poem (such as more medical images in a poem that mentions a medical situation).
4. Are there illogical truths your poem should be telling instead of or in addition to more familiar ideas?
5. Write comments and questions on a draft of your poem. Formulating the problems you see could help you begin to solve them. If other people make suggestions, write them all down so you can reconsider them later.
6. Use contrasts. Try adding as many different kind of contrasts as you can.
7. It’s supposed to be fun. What could you change in your poem to make it more enjoyable to you?
8. Revise to take out words such as “joy,” “sorrow,” and “beauty” that summarize without being linked to specific experiences.
9. Make your poems weigh more at the end than the beginning.
10. Learn to make the senses work in poems, all of them, rather than the brain only.
11. Look at your poem to see if it relies on cadences—phrases that fall into symmetrical or nearly symmetrical patterns, organizing speech rhythms.
12. In each poem you invent a new form. What’s the nature of that form in the poem you’re revising? How can you change the poem to make it more truly itself?
13. Where does your poem first surprise you? Should you start the poem there?
14. Try writing at the same time each day or night for three sessions. Incorporate details from your days’ experiences into a poem you think should be richer.
15. Open a book to a random page. Touch it without looking. Add the closest noun or verb to your poem. Choose a random page from a dictionary and add a word from each side of the page to your poem.
16. Eavesdrop. Write down four sentences that you overhear. Include parts of all of them in your poem.
17. Look for ways to turn up the volume. Make the poem more fierce, more emotionally charged, more deeply human.
18. Form and stick with the habit of writing; consider doing one thing a day related to your identity as a writer.
19. Set goals for your poetry writing. If you’ve already set them, check to see what you’ve done that helps you move toward these goals.
20. Look for chances to read your poems before an audience. This will help you reconsider poems in terms of their accessibility, rhythms, sequence of images, and emotional power.