Danger of over editing?

[dukealien]

...

meh - i don't know - I realize that sometimes we lose the original seed of an idea or get off track but sometimes we end up with an entirely new idea for a poem and we can always go back, nothing is ever lost

Must respectfully disagree.  For me, it's:  get an idea, jot it down, write the poem (which may evolve into something slightly, or very, different in the process).  Alternate path, look at the jot, idea's gone.  The words are there, but the constellation surrounding them has vanished.  Gestalt?  I almost religiously keep all my interim states of a poem, but it's just paranoia about losing the *current* one, not any thought of returning to an earlier state and branching from there.  That helicopter has left the embassy; it's not coming back.

Which is not to say everyone works this way, or anyone does.  Heraclitus said you cannot cross the same river twice.  If I can even find my way back to that piece of riverbank, and the river is still exactly the same - frozen in text or something - I still can't recapture the state of... what was I talking about?