Okay, you have some first drafts...now what?
Now, it's time to settle down and dive into some deep poetry revision. Below are five tips to help you get start with revising your own poem.
http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/5-ways-to-revise-poems
- Search for form. One of the first things I like to do after “finishing” a first draft is to count syllables to see if I’ve written a poem in a certain form. Sometimes, I’ll even do this mid-draft if I get the feeling that a form is establishing itself. By form, I don’t mean traditional forms (haiku, sonnet, etc) though sometimes that can happen. A form could be as simple as 8-syllable per lines or a pattern of 7-, 9-, and 5-syllable lines (which happened to me over the weekend). The nice thing about form is that it acts as the skeleton for the poem–the structure that gives shape to the body of the poem.
- Look for ways to cut. Sometime the best way to make a good poem is to cut out all the extra fat. This might include prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs. It might also include cutting lines that “explain” what a poem means or is getting at. With poetry, writers try to "say" what they want to the reader using the fewest words possible.
- Pay attention to line breaks. While every word in your poem should have a purpose, readers place more emphasis on the ends and beginnings of lines–the places where the lines break. For me, I try to find ways to surprise readers here. Every poem I write gets a thorough line break inspection. Ask yourself: Where should this line end? Why?
- Listen for sounds. The chief quality I love about poetry (and this is showing my own bias) is the musical nature of poetry. When done well, I think poetry–including poetry that doesn’t rhyme–reads (and can be read) as music. As such, I already try to write first drafts with sound in mind, but then I go through the drafts looking for potential end rhymes, internal rhymes, assonance and consonance. For this step, I do read the poem aloud at different times of the day and in different moods (and even voices).
- Make things concrete. This step does not involve “spelling out” the meaning of the poem. Instead, I look for any abstract words that made it into the poem (words like “love,” “hate,” and “fear”) and try replacing them with concrete words and images. At times, I even replace concrete words with more specific (or unusual) concrete words.
http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/5-ways-to-revise-poems