How to Edit a Poem

Constructive approaches to take; useful questions to ask

Editing. Not fixing typos or cleaning up commas. Editing. In other words, transforming, developing, growing a new, adolescent poem. It's hard to know where to start, especially if you don't have a workshop group or a tutor. There's no one-size-fits-all editing method; every poem is unique, so you have to come at editing every poem with a spirit of discovery and no preconceived assumptions. To help, I've outlined an approach to guide (and maybe change) the way you edit your poetry.

First of all, don't come at it thinking 'how can I make this better?', or worse, 'how can I make this not bad?', or (heaven forbid!) 'how I can make this like other, more successful, more popular poems?' These lines of enquiry are too vague, you'll drive yourself mad trying to make a poem 'better', whatever that means. You'll probably keep trying to make the same old fixes and keep running into dead-ends. These lines of enquiry also do nothing to stimulate or nurture your own, unique creativity. That's very important, and it's no less important when you get to the editing stage. Your goal shouldn't just be to make your poem nebulously 'better', your goal should be to make your poem more you. You is good, you is great. That's where the originality and the magic is.

The questions below are some of the questions I ask myself when I edit my own poetry, and I also apply them to the poems of others when I critique professionally. These represent a much more constructive line of enquiry that I hope you'll find useful:

1. What do I want to achieve with this poem? Have I achieved it?

   
   

2. What is this poem doing well? Can I do more of it?

   
   

3. What about this poem makes it sound like me, and nobody else?

   
   

4. What is this poem asking of the reader? Have I made it clear what this poem's deal is?

   
   

5. Is there anything in this poem that I don't need in order for it to achieve my aim? Is there anything holding it back? Is anything unnecessary?

   
   

6. Do all the levels - content, image, sound, structure, line breaks, arrangement on the page - work together harmoniously?

   
   

7. Did anything about this poem surprise me (in a good way) when I wrote it? Could I lean in to that?

Poetry Editing Pro-tips

Consider editing a learning experience

When you edit a poem you're not just polishing a piece up before you put it out in the world. Every time you edit you have the opportunity to learn something about editing and about writing. Every edit can make you a better poet, not just give you a better poem. Approach it like that and you'll get more out of the experience, and you'll do even better next time.

Consider editing a creative practice

A mistake that poets (especially beginner poets) make, is to assume that writing the first draft is the creative bit, and that editing it is the miserable, mechanical bit. It's not true, and it's no wonder that most of them hate editing with that attitude. Embrace editing as a chance to be newly creative, to problem-solve and to add, because that's exactly what it is.

Make draft copies

When you redraft, don't edit the same poem over and over. Make a copy and then edit that copy. When you do another redraft, copy the last version and edit that copy, so on and so forth. You might like to make a new document for each and call them something distinguishable like '[poem] version 2', '[poem] version 3'...and so on. I like to keep everything in one document and I put each new version on a new page, then everything is in one place.

The point of this is to make it easy to see what you've changed or taken away, and so you can easily revert to previous versions if you change your mind. There's also a psychological element to this: if you preserve the original version, then you'll find it much easier to make drastic changes to a copy, since the original will remain completely unscathed, no matter what you do to version 2.

Don't delete anything, ever

It doesn't matter how bad you think your poem is, keep it, don't delete it. You might feel differently about it tomorrow, next month, or next year. You might feel stuck with a poem now, but if you keep a copy then you can always come back to it and have another go at it another time. I like to hold on to poems so I can cannibalise them for parts in other poems. Often, a poem doesn't work, but it still has some great lines or images that you can find a better use for later.

Submit your poem to the 'drawer test'

Poems love the drawer. The drawer is the best. Your poem wants to be in the drawer. When you spend a lot of time and energy on a poem, you get too close to it, and then you can't see it clearly anymore. So, when you finish editing a draft, put it away in a drawer (digital or literal, either's fine) and don't look at it for a week or more. When you look at it again you'll have forgotten all about it, so you'll be looking at it with fresh eyes. This way, you get a good measure of how effective your changes have been, and what work there may still be to do.

Were these tips helpful? Drop me a comment, I'm always open to chat.

If you'd like to learn some more specific, practical strategies for editing poems, you might be interested in my downloadable lesson Editing Happy. This lesson includes an editing toolkit you can apply to any poem, and it will show you how to see editing as positive, creative and fun.

Or, if you feel you'd benefit from some one-to-one guidance, you might be interested in my professional critique services instead. I provide expert feedback on your poems, helping you to edit and improve. Receive feedback on a single poem for only £25 with Single Poem Feedback. Or, if you're submitting multiple poems, you might be more interested in my Mentoring service.

If you'd like to read some poems of my own, these days I publish all of my new work for free on my Substack, Solarion, along with criticism and some other bits.