Revision Idea

Hi everyone!

There is a revision idea that I’ve been tossing around in my head for the past few weeks (maybe someone had previously mentioned it in class?) that I’ve finally put into practice. My idea, which was to revise a poem taking out all of the pronouns, was somewhat inspired by feeling like I use too many “I’s” and “you’s” in my poetry, however when I tried it I realized that it made most of my poems entirely nonsensical. While I don’t think that I will be using this revision prompt too much, it did make me think about a method of revising as: deletion. I am now going through various poems and revising them according to a method of deleting one or two specific things, whether they be words or conjunctions or prepositional phrases and so forth. I find that this helps me reduce my poem to a kind of core or skeleton of what I want, eliminating or identifying things I really want in a poem. While this may not be an exceptionally inspiring or groundbreaking idea to anyone, I wanted to share it regardless.

Happy revising,

Christy.

One Reply to “Revision Idea”

  1. Christy,
    I think it’s pretty funny that my revising process is almost the complete opposite; I like to add as much as I can to the poem before I start deleting redundancies. I want to make sure that my poem is clearly expressing the emotions or images I want to set forth, so I try to create new ways to say those things and then remove the ones I don’t like. I think it’s the idea of losing anything I’ve deemed good enough to go into a draft that keeps me from radical revisions where I delete a lot of my content, and I have a lot of respect for people who can take out large portions and still feel satisfied.

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