- Read it slowly, out loud, to yourself. If the music pleases you, notice that and do not lose the music as you revise.
- Read it again silently to yourself, asking whether you have said what is deepest and truest. Have you gone “all the way”? Have you seen clearly? Have you given that clarity to the reader? The best revision is being certain you have told all of the truth of this one piece. Sometimes you achieve more truth by cutting back “to the bone.” Sometimes something needs to be added.
- Is there anything that you can omit without loss of music, meaning, or clarity? Are there any words that are overused? If you use archaic words (o’er, ’twere) or wornout rhymes (moon/June/croon/spoon), you will be repeating patterns that others before you have made tiresome.
- Try different line formations; see whether by breaking a line in the middle of a phrase you enhance the meaning of both lines. Let every line have some significance, some weight of its own.
- Have a sense of “play.” Trust disconnections. Surprise yourself. If you get stuck, read it again out loud and go back to where the music was right. Cut back to there and begin again.
- At the end, a poem should open out to wider significance. Avoid closing it down too much. Try not to tell your reader what your reader can be trusted to discover. In Enid’s poem, above, the image of the mother covering the child’s eyes tells us everything we need to know about the event, the mother, the child. It “opens out” to the significance of the event, gives us room to imagine, to linger in the experience of being the child, being the adult woman remembering, being the mother trying to protect the child, being the grandfather, being the truck driver. It does not “close down” as it would if the last line were something like “Oh, it hurt me so much,” or “my mother tried to protect me.” Instead of telling us, the poet has allowed us see. Often the best end for a poem is a specific, clear image. No “telling” by the writer. Only “showing.” As reader, then, I have been there; at the end of the poem I have my own feelings and meanings to sort out. The “Ah ha!”—the revelation—is mine. Every good poem is a collaboration between the writer and the reader.
- Type it.
- Let the visual shape of the poem on the page be satisfying. Try breaking it into lines, playing with it to see if it wants to be a lined poem. Or type it out as a prose poem, without broken lines.