Revision Process

[shemthepenman]

A novelist comes out with a book that gets panned and that's that. He doesn't keep releasing a different version until more people like it.

The big difference between releasing a novel and workshopping a poem is that long before a novel is released it should have gone through several editing stages.  Rarely -- if ever -- does a novel come out in toto straight from the novelist's pen to your eyeballs. Writing a novel is a commercial venture (despite any number that fail dismally due to all sorts of reasons, not always directly related to the writer's ability or the quality of the work) and as such, there are plenty of people who make a living out of editing.  Unfortunately, there are very few people in the world who can afford to be full-time (or even reasonably part-time) poetry editors, so if we want a serious, discerning eye run over our poems before moving them out into the wider world then a workshop like this one (and in fact, there are no other workshops like this one) is pretty much our only option unless we happen to live in a nicely artistic community (and even then, it's not necessarily hippie weirdo advice that makes a poem better).  

As consumers, we only get to see the "finished product".  That finished product is, for the most part, the result of many failures, revisions, rewrites and rejections.  Even though I feel quite confident that I can revise on my own these days, I am always grateful for a critical eye that picks up on something I might never have thought of myself.

that's what i said. i want full credit for this concept. i am The Originator! oh wait, am i not special :/