Revision Process

[Achebe]

I went it alone most of my life. Since hanging out here and putting some poems under the microscope and thinking a lot harder about other people's poems, I find that when I go it alone, as we all do at the birth of a poem anyway, the result is more appealing to me, I catch a better way to say it before it hits the page and I feel like my reach is a little longer. I like what the workshopping process has done for and to me. I write some dead stuff with good technique now but I always wrote an unknown percentage of shit. I think my strong ones are stronger now.

Ok, so workshopping doesn't keep you from writing crap, it just makes you more able to capitalize on the good stuff. That makes sense. And, as for writing dead things well, I say: Meeeeee too

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 it is pretty clear that none of us are poetic geniuses

Only history gets to decide this, 50 years after we're all dead.

no, i hate to break it to you, you're not a genius, not now and not in 50 years time.
it is actually strange, i feel like you might genuinely take offence at me telling you you're not a genius. what were you saying about egotistical?  

anyway, my point is, if you want to write great poetry in this lifetime and you have the humility and self-awareness to acknowledge that you do not have a preternatural gift for writing you could do worse than experimenting with a few suggested edits. . . in fact, you could do a lot worse, you could try imagining you are a tortured genius in a world that doesn't understand you, writing by yourself, for yourself. . . and look where that's got poor old rowen. if anyone could benefit from accepting a few suggestions, it's that boy; he can barely write a coherent sentence and yet extols the virtues of self-editing!

anyway, thanks again. good discussion. learnt a lot. cheers big ears!

I have read some phenomenal poems on this forum, so if the writers will never be known outside a small circle it's more a reflection on the general high standard of writing in the public today. I don't think that Shakespeare's sonnets would be read if they were not from a cultural totem of the English speaking world. And had Emily Dickinson been a Yemeni or Kiwi poet, without the benefit of America's cultural marketing money power, where would she be today?
My point is not that everyone is an unrecognised genius, but that a number of 'great' writers from history were fairly average by today's standards.

This thread has got quite off topic.

So back on track: I think revisions get fewer comments because most of what needed to be said, has been said in the response to the original, and at least in my mind, it doesn't feel egalitarian to bump up a thread which already has a lot of comments on it, and which the commenting process always does, at the expense of more recent posts with fewer ones.