Comments on: 10 Easy Tips to Revise Your Poems

By: Editing Experiment: Street Sounds v3 | Musings from the Newly Hatched

Editing Experiment: Street Sounds v3 | Musings from the Newly Hatched — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:54:57 +0000

[...] 24, 2010 8:54 pm I’ve gone back in for additional revision: I focused on using stronger, clearer words, cutting unneeded language, and did some reformatting. [...]

By: Editing Experiment: Street Sounds v2 | Musings from the Newly Hatched

Editing Experiment: Street Sounds v2 | Musings from the Newly Hatched — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:28:22 +0000

[...] I chose to do the first two of Sonya’s suggestions: [...]

By: Yousei Hime

Yousei Hime — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:47:25 +0000

Thank you so much for this. I followed you over from a link on Pamela Villars’ blog. I look forward to returning and learning/sharing more.

By: A Message from Your Sponsor | Musings from the Newly Hatched

A Message from Your Sponsor | Musings from the Newly Hatched — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:11:43 +0000

[...] we’ve made a plan to work together to, well, get the work done. She’s already posted a piece about how to begin editing your first drafts, which is great because I had no idea where to [...]

By: diane

diane — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:49:05 +0000

Sonya, Really great ideas.
Other stuff I look for in my edits:
- Verb tense. In a first pass, I usually write in several tenses. Besides getting things straight, I also ask myself, what is the right tense for this poem?
- POV – rewrite the poem in a different POV – you might stick to your original POV, but rewriting in a different POV can bring things to the poem that weren’t in the first pass. i don’t know how many poems i’ve written that feature a she, he, we, you, and an I. very crowded.
- adjectives/adverbs – cut them, when possible. replace with strong verbs.
- titles – this is crucial. does the title invite someone to read the poem? i don’t necessarily think the title has to even relate to the poem (i know, this is probably nuts), but the title should be compelling. i like long titles rather than short abstract titles – like “snowboard-racing at midnight with turkey-stuff Texans.”
d

By: Pamela Villars

Pamela Villars — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:17:23 +0000

These are great, Sonya, thank you! I’m happy to notice that I do a number of these already, but now I know where to focus as I move forward.