Recursed

[rayheinrich]

@rayheinrich - Yes, thanks, "chastened" was only a passing thought.  Is it etiquette in this forum to wait until critiques stop coming in, to post another poem?

@AlstonTowers - Thank you for the read, comments, and suggestion.  I'll think about removing "a" in l.2 - it is smoother, but I like an accented first syllable on that line.  Small changes, most ambivalent; a big change is more obviously right or wrong.

@Joatmon - Thank you, it is a lot of advice for a small poem, but I did mark myself as relatively new to free verse, and the advice has been very good.  Need to get into the rhythm of the site, learn how long to wait before posting an edit.

You can post one poem per day in one of the three workshops as long as you have provided at least one new critique in a workshop for someone else.

That was the easy question, when to edit is very subjective, differing from poet to poet and poem to poem.

Ditto what ellajam said.

Editing gets kinda weird as what's good one day is bad the next is actually better than the good of
two days ago and on the fourth day you are convinced it's bad and you're worse.

I try to ignore the mood swings and use a more objective standard as to when a poem's finished:
It's ready when you can't stand to look at it one more time (for me, a poem is never really finished).

Another thing I do is keep every version from the very first. And save them in small editing increments
rather than large ones. This can mean, for me, that one of my poem documents has 5 to 10 (even 20
every once in a while) versions one below the other. What I've found, since I'm someone who tends to
over-edit, is that my best poem usually comes 2 or 3 versions before the last version. I also find that
it's helpful, once you have what you think is the "final", to look back to the original to see if there's some
fresh detail in the original that got accidentally dropped along the way.

And then, most important of all, wait a few weeks, come back, and see if you were crazy or not.

Ray