Finally! You’ve put in some long hours and late nights, you are in a full-fledged poetry relationship, and your eyes—now bloodshot from staring at a glowing screen for the last week straight—are ready to fall out of your head, but hey, you can take pride in knowing that you’ve written an entire poetry collection that is ready for publication! Or is it? Sure, the last thing you probably want to do after all of that work is to go back and read through everything you wrote, but believe it or not, doing so will improve your chances of being taken seriously as a poet.
Let’s take a minute to break down exactly what you should be looking for as you edit your own work. Bear in mind that everyone’s editing process is a little different, but this chapter will give you a solid place to begin.
Maybe you haven’t written a book, but the complicated poem you just finished in iambic pentameter flows beautifully, rhymes masterfully, and touches on truths no one has ever put into such understandable terms. If only you hadn’t posted it to your Instagram feed before realizing that, instead of newspaper, you wrote newspapper with three “p”s.
Where was autocorrect for that one? As our culture shifts more and more toward the online, paperless world, this handy little function can make communication much easier and faster for everyone who doesn’t happen to have a dictionary handy, but it has also become the downfall of many contemporary poets. How many times have you skipped a true editing session, opting instead to hurry the posting of your latest poem? Then, three days and several comments later, you go back to find that instead of “happen,” your autocorrect assumed you were trying to type “hasten.” Three days! Three days your poem has been out for the world to see, and it makes no sense, because you didn’t take the time to do a thorough edit. If only you could have caught those simple mistakes before representing yourself as a haphazard poet!
Sound familiar at all? Many writers, in their quests for notoriety, get caught up in the rat race side of things, forgetting to take their time focusing on the quality of their content instead of the quantity of it. It’s a simple mistake everyone makes at some point, but even those small errors can add up to big consequences. Misspelled words, incorrectly used punctuation, synonyms that have been plugged in where they don’t belong: these are all on the list of frequent faux pas, and they can all be avoided by taking some time after the writing has ended to proofread your work.
“But won’t the reader still get what I mean, even if there is a mistake or two? And I want to get published someday! Won’t the publishers have hired editors to check for errors? I want to be a writer—not an editor.” Good questions! And hopefully someday you will be the published poet you’ve always dreamt of becoming. But it’s important to focus on the small things—the “baby steps” that will get you there, and will still be necessary as a published poet. Building up your vocabulary, polishing your grammatical proficiency, and painting beautiful imagery with your words, meter, and attention to detail are invaluable skills that will help you to push your writing to the next level. As obvious as something might be to you, others might not know what you mean or understand where you are coming from. Looking back at your work with an editorial eye will help you find parts where the reader could be confused or interpret your words in a different way than you intended. As you know, poetry is a very subjective art form: the message you are communicating isn’t necessarily the message that someone else will end up receiving. That’s absolutely part of the beauty of poetry, but if you’re trying to win contests or get one of your poems into a hard-bound poetry collection, the best way to do that is to get your message—the same message—across to as many people as possible, and the only way you’re going to know how to make that happen is by taking those baby steps all the way through to the end.
I swim through worlds of blue and green,
Fly through clouds of silver gleam,
And leap from heights I’ve never seen,
Except it’s all in my head.
You chose all the words to write and carefully crafted the imagery they depict, so you already know exactly what to expect from your work, right? You have so much confidence in your poetic ability, in fact, that you can quote the entire piece from memory. Unfortunately, sometimes our brains work a little faster than our hands and eyes. Words get mashed together, entire sentences go missing, and your thoughts on current political events somehow turn into a detailing of your feelings toward the girl next door. These mistakes happen to the best of us, because we spend so much time wrestling with ideas in our heads, and it’s all our pens and keyboards can do to keep up.
It’s not a bad thing, but that’s why editing is so important: it slows us down and pulls us out of la-la land and back into the real world where our words are being read—not experienced. Reading through your own work effectively puts you into the shoes of your audience, so that you can experience the writing from their perspective. In addition to the grammatical errors, you’ll see the places where focus and flow may be lost, and how the overarching message you’re trying to communicate may be unclear or missing. Finding any of this in your writing? Good thing you read through your work again before you posted it!
That role reversal should also be critically important to you as a poet, because if you can’t put yourself into someone else’s shoes, then you’re probably going to have a very hard time writing poetry that elicits feelings in others. Even if you become well known for exclusively writing reflective poetry, your success as a poet will eventually plateau if you cannot engage your readers’ thoughts and feelings. So if editing is something you truly dread after you’ve finished “the hard part,” then try to think of it as practice in reading as a critic.
Speaking of “the hard part,” it can be easy to wave off editing as the “easy part” that you can rush through just before posting your work. However, editing is just as involved because it’s where feelings come into the mix. No one is going to fault you for feeling emotional when you write, because at the core of poetry is a very real, very powerful emotional drive, but when it comes time to hand your work over for public critique, it’s easy to become a completely different kind of emotional: defensive.
Maybe it’s due to the digital culture of competition, maybe it’s the artistic nature of poetry, or maybe it has more to do with a sense of pride and accomplishment in completing a piece of writing. Somehow, though, whenever a writer’s work is opened up to public judgment, it is natural to become overly sensitive when the feedback received is anything but positive. Social networks are notorious for this sort of hypersensitivity, too. Have you ever read a poem on Instagram where the very first word was misspelled, but when you commented with the correct spelling to help that poet, you just got blocked? Poets can be a touchy bunch, but the fact of the matter is that editing your own work can save you from a lot of upset.
This doesn’t mean you’ll never receive negative feedback, but when you are routinely editing your own writing, you become accustomed to better dealing with the mistakes you make. Over time, you should even begin to identify patterns in your writing, so that in the future, you’ll “feel” the mistakes coming before they have a chance to make it onto paper. Thousands of mistakes later and years down the road, comments like, “I don’t understand what you mean by this,” become much easier to deal with, and simple observations of spelling and grammatical errors become comments you are thankful for instead of comments you dread. In this regard, editing is much like drinking coffee (often an acquired taste): at first it may taste downright awful, but as you continue to expose yourself to it, you develop more of a taste—or at least tolerance—for it.
Okay, now that we’ve been over a couple of the reasons why editing is beneficial to you as a poet, let’s talk a little more about the editing process. Since every poet is unique, every poet’s method for editing will be different, but there are definitely a few things to keep in the back of your mind to help you refine your work. Use these tips as a jumping-off point, but also understand that you should personalize and build upon them to fit your writing style. By doing so, your writing will maintain and radiate that sense of true intimacy and originality that can be lost when following a prescribed set of guidelines.
The first rule—and this should come as no surprise—is to take your time. Be slow in writing, and slower in your corrections. Don’t rush any part of the process. You know how long poems can take to write; between juggling complicated notions of emotion and imagery, and trying to find the right words to communicate those concepts, writing a good poem is rarely as simple as sitting down at your computer and plugging away for five minutes. Most poets make their first mistakes here. Rushing the writing process can be just as deadly to your success as opting out of the editing process altogether. Poets who write slowly and methodically, thinking over every single letter and word before it gets to the page, usually avoid making more mistakes in the initial draft, which makes the editing process a lot easier.
The second mistake is made when poets sit down to edit their work the instant the writing has ended. The root word of Instagram is “instant,” true enough, but do you remember when we mentioned how easy it is for poets to get stuck in their heads? If you go into the editing process while you’re still on the flight back from la-la land, how can you expect yourself to be objective enough to see your mistakes? Try to think of your poetry as a bottle of fine wine: once it’s been opened up, it needs a chance to breathe a little before the true flavors can shine through. In other words, take at least a twenty-four-hour break from any given piece of writing before you begin editing it. Don’t write more on the same piece—don’t even write a completely separate poem. Instead, focus on another task entirely. Go out and ride your bike for a while, or prepare a snack, or watch a TV show; one way or another, make a clean break from writing altogether. This way, when you return to edit, you’ll be coming at the poem with a fresh mind, clear focus, and an objective point of view—the three things that best facilitate quality editing. Don’t be afraid to take breaks during the editing process as well! Breaks in editing will allow you to keep a fresh focus while you work.
Once you begin making revisions to your work, remember to track your changes. For old-school pen-and-paper poets, making changes isn’t nearly as dangerous, but for those of you committing wholeheartedly to our shiny-screened culture, not tracking those changes is no-no number three. Poets are just as prone to getting lost in their writing during the initial drafts as they are during the editing phase. For example, while editing one of your works, you decide that within the first stanza you’d rather line three end with “broken” instead of “shattered,” which changes the rhyme scheme. You continue through the piece, making necessary amendments here and there, only to find by the fourth stanza that “broken” doesn’t illustrate the pieces of your glasslike heart as poignantly as “shattered” did. The problem is, because you weren’t tracking your changes, all of the original content and rhyming is lost.
Most word processors have a function that lets you make text changes without deleting the original content, allowing you to read both the original and altered content. Become familiar with this function, because it will save you both headaches and tears in the future, especially where longer pieces are concerned. This tool also affords you ample time to take those much-needed breaks to clear your head. It will keep track of all the changes you’ve made to a certain point, so when you have finally slept or eaten or showered (maybe for the first time in a while), you can go back to the editing process and pick up right where you left off.
The journey has been long, and your brain is positively overflowing with all the information you’ve gleaned from the pages of this poetry guide. Now what? What could possibly be left? This is where your creativity really gets to shine, because in Part 3 you will get to put everything you’ve learned into action with a plethora of prompts and challenges handcrafted to set your fingers flying. Buckle up!