dead dead

You kept coaxing and poking the poem to get up…until you realized it wasn’t playing dead.

change it

Print is only a temporary arresting of the text—change it if you need to.

had a pulse

Because a few iambs continued to beat inside the poem the poet was able to bring it back to life.

flash to ash

The poem composed in a flash, and any revision would leave only ash.

dead dead

He went back to revise the poem not realizing rigor mortis had set in.

worth the effort

Spend the time revising this poem, or just spin up a new one.

much worse than that

A poem that had to get much worse before it could be made any better.

not coming back

The poem was dead but I kept poking it in the ribs with my pen.

whip hand

Some just ride the poem; some hold the whip and will use it.

no better or worse

A poem that could be endlessly revised and be no better for it.

prune it back

As in gardening so it is in poetry, one should not be afraid to cut back the growth.

against the stream

Poet, don’t go with the flow. Think of the stones in a stream, the way they impede and change the direction of the water. Make that a model for revision.

missile strikethrough

When writing, you’ll notice that certain words seem to be looking over their shoulders, certain that at any minute a strikethrough was about to hit them.

art as performance

During one of my visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesn’t correct or repaint, ever. He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it.

—Janet Malcolm, “Forty-one False Starts" [#4], Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

slow for construction

Writing in a notebook makes composition slower and revision harder, and that can be a good thing.

like jenga

A poem like Jenga in which taking away a single line could result in sudden collapse.

nothing to show

Unlike a person asked to solve an algebraic equation, the poet cannot answer the charge: “Show your work.”

revision's end

It was while revising the poem you realized it wasn’t worth the effort.

fussy too much

There is such a thing as fussy revision that matters not when it comes to the reader's experience.

to stem the tide

Day after day, I will write the same poem in the sand, allowing the tide to erase it. Until I get it right, and then even the tide dare not touch it.