Comments on: poll dance: step away from the poem

By: Read Write Poem

Read Write Poem — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:44:53 +0000

Here are the final results. Well, not results. But numbers based on reader responses:

If I gathered up all my finished poems (whatever that means for you), I’d have… (choose one!):

50-99 (23%, 13 Votes)
100-199 (23%, 13 Votes)
30-49 (19%, 11 Votes)
zero (I can’t finish a piece) (7%, 4 Votes)
200-299 (7%, 4 Votes)
1000 or more (7%, 4 Votes)
1-29 (5%, 3 Votes)
300-499 (5%, 3 Votes)
500-999 (4%, 2 Votes)

57 total votes

By: Noah

Noah — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:34:41 +0000

I tend to write a lot. I wouldn’t consider any of my poems truly finished. I go by the mindset that if I write a lot, something good will come sometime around.

Which I really like some of the stuff I have been writing lately.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:50:09 +0000

I have to confess, I ADORE editing and revision. Sometimes I read poems by other people, and revise them as though they were my own, just for fun. (I don’t share these, of course. That would be pretty rude.) I find it much easier to rehaul a piece with a good core to it than to come up with something with any material worth editing. That’s why I have so few finished poems. I probably have 20 proto-poems that never get worked on to every poem that I edit, and around 5-10 unfinished poems to every one I ever consider “finished”.

For me, “finished” means that if I read it in a book somewhere, I’d say “Damn, that was a good poem!” If I wouldn’t waste my time reading it again, I haven’t spent enough time writing it.

I have very, very few finished poems. And some that I once considered finished I end up trashing later anyway. I’d say that I have under 20 poems that I still like.

As for manuscripts, I wouldn’t know. I guess that’s the sort of thing that editors get a say in, but a book is so far from my mind right now.

By: One More Believer

One More Believer — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:23:14 +0000

i liked yr… step away from the poem… it’s sorta like the send button on an email… you know that movie you’ve got mail.. where he hesitates to press the send button on the “Let’s Meet” email… i sorta run outta time… the creation creates and then sits there… sometimes in small whispers telling me to change a word a phase.. other times the poem hatches and flies away in moments… only recently started writing seriously… in the sense of writing it down making an effort to form something and let it go… in the case of a blog publish the poem.. rarely do i change a poem once i’ve published it… maybe for typos but that’s abt it… the poems i like the most are the ones that take the most effort… working for a few days attached at the hip always thinking abt it… sometimes the poem talks back to me and sez you coulda done this with that word instead of choosing that word…scolding that i didn’t take more time to caress the final… it is the discovery of words that form images and thoughts buried deep somewhere that is a part of me willing to express in the open… a sorta magical sense of freedom…

By: sister AE

sister AE — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:08:52 +0000

I tend toward abandonment. When something is good-enough, but not perfect, I am OK to let it go, especially if that thing inside me is no longer pushing itself onto the page. So although I was in the 200 range, a large number of those are not ones I would consider good – just finished. They being as finished with me as I am of them.

Like Donald, I have folders from other ages of my life. And I don’t feel an urge to revise the pieces that are pure teenage angst.

That said, revising is tough for me, my mind has trouble staying with the inspiration that drove the creation in the first place. It makes revising a poem easily turn into a complete take-over, with the words and phrases I like being co-opted to another effort.

Anyone else?

By: dale

dale — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:45:52 +0000

Isn’t a poem finished when changing it makes it worse rather than better?

By: Donald Harbour

Donald Harbour — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:08:13 +0000

I revise! I like to revise! There is poetry in my files that was written in the late fifties and sixties. Some of it war protest, some of it pretty juvenile. That said I find inspiration in the thought expressed in the lines of my older work. I leave the original but put my experience and more mature grasp of wordsmith to the work. I view revision much as a cosmetic surgeon views a wrinkled crinkled sagging face. A nip here, a tuck there, a smidgen of botox, maybe a peel, now don’t you look pretty?

The nice thing about contributing to Read Write Poem is that it has given me a chance to dust off some long forgotten pieces (with a little surgical reformation of course) and respond to the prompts. Many times I can take pieces of different poems and provide a work.

One other thing that has my curiosity needing a dose of Beano: to how many people is Dana married?:-| I thought there was a law against that. Oh, Oh, Oh…I feel a poem coming on. Gotta go and did into my juicy poetry.

Regards,
DCH

By: nibblepoems

nibblepoems — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:47:54 +0000

I don’t ever really see a poem as finished. If a poem finds a home, get’s publish on paper or website, I leave it alone. I congratulate it on finding someone who loved it enough and isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that enough?

Someone loves you. Who am I do mess with that?

The ones who are still living under my roof? Those are fair game for revision. “Well, until you find a home, I’m going to nit-pick and waver. Change this, flip that. Send you out again.”

http://nibblepoems.wordpress.com