Killing Drafts

I revised a couple of poems over the last week – one was almost there but needed more work, the other was nowhere in particular, but I think it’s getting somewhere now. It can be a slow process – revision.

There’s the danger of killing off everything that was interesting in the original draft and ending up only with the bits that seem good because that kind of thing has seemed good in other people’s poems.

There’s the danger that, in trying to push the poem off from where it was before into some place more interesting, you might push things too far and end up sounding inauthentic i.e. trying too hard to be interesting!

There’s the danger of battering your head against a computer screen at ten past midnight in total frustration at a poem that won’t quite work the way you hoped when you wrote those first few lines and everything had so much promise.

There are so many ways to kill a promising draft stone dead, it’s a wonder good poems manage to get written at all. But somehow they do. I can’t yet tell whether these latest ones are good or destined for the shredder (many of my poem-attempts end up unread by anyone but me. I can imagine them all meeting up in some after-life venue for discarded poems. Not a happy place, I guess).