Believe it or not, some poets get more excited about editing their poems than they do about writing the first draft or even seeing them in print!
Are you one of those writers who loves to putter around in a sentence, changing this word or that word, rearranging phrases, or trying out different titles? If so, here are some editing tasks you're going to love:
| Testing different line breaks and stanza lengths |
| Moving words around to create assonance or consonance |
| Choosing a line or phrase to repeat elsewhere in the poem |
| Eliminating (!) or adding words to create a more pleasing rhythm |
| Replacing wordy phrases with sleeker words eager to please |
| Adopting more features of the form you chose for the poem |
In this lesson, you'll look back at poems you wrote and select a couple to revise and edit in a way that brings together all of what you know about poetry.
Question
How can changing where a line breaks affect the reader's experience?
Line breaks tell readers where to pause and how often to pause, which can affect the reader's pace. Line breaks are sometimes used to place special emphasis on a word that appears at the end of a line.
