Tackling Poems You Think You Love

Often in my earlier writing I would find that I wrote something that had promise but on the whole was clumsy or lacking in any lyrical quality or maybe just pretencions. Very rookie mistakes for any poets. It became a common problem to really rework these pieces. Cosmetic shifts here and there but you become so married to a particular aspect of the poem that you find you simply cannot go beyond a certain point.

Last night I pulled out one such poem and began reworking it. I spent over an hour on it and the real victory was that I was willing to tackle it at all. This morning I'm thinking that while it is much improved, I'd like to really take it apart some more and see if I can take it some other direction altogether, and what that might look like.