And here I go about revisions again. I’ve been looking over this semester’s poetry, plus a few oldies, and I find myself going from radical revisions to writing completely new poems, based on the older poems I’m less than happy with. Do these new poems, with the spirit of the old poem embedded, exist as altogether new poems and therefore not revisions, or are they revisions because they have their basis in an old poem? I’ve always had a hard time with the revision process because I like to take the time to let my poems ferment before I come back to them, but as I revise, I tend to go for either something small and barely noticeable or some large change that makes the poem almost unrecognizable. How have you all been able to find a happy medium, where your poem still includes the original poem but also manages to change something fundamental about it?
Poetry and the Poetic @ SUNY Geneseo English