How do you edit?

[brandontoh]

To me, editing poems is similar to the process of distillation. You're trying to get to the essence of an idea or concept. Sometimes after looking at a poem for a long time, I realise that to achieve what I wanted, I need to start anew, and a completely different poem is born. Most of the times, I slowly chisel away at the inadequate and weaker parts of the poem until I get what I want. Before I post them up for critique, I usually go through 1 to 20 edits depending on the first draft, and then when I no longer know how I can make it better I put it up in the forum.