Poetry, Writing Tips

Revising Poetry and Wildness

Crafting an Entirely New Vision for Your Poems

“The writing of poetry is not a craft. We are making birds, not birdcages” –p.47, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

Revision is one of my least favorite things to do as a writer of fiction, but when it comes to poetry, I absolutely love it. As an editor, I work with many poets who are struggling to understand what a poem is and how they can improve their poetry. They see other poets succeeding (getting poetry acceptances, writing full-length collections, etc.) and want to know how to be a better writer of poetry.

In her MasterClass, Margaret Atwood says, “Revision means re-vision — you’re seeing it anew, and quite frequently when you’re doing that, you see possibilities that you didn’t see before and that light up parts of the book in a way that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that.”

After all, the hardest part of writing a poem is knowing how it will be received and learning to write poems that connect with the reader on a deeper level. In her book, A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver calls this “writing memorably”. It’s the act of writing poems someone will remember long after reading them, or even…