On Freesia McKee’s “13 ways to revise a poem”
A wise poet once said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Paul Valéry, French poet and essayist, was certainly not wrong when he said this.
So much of writing is revising: fine-tuning a detail, sharpening language, taking the piece apart, and stripping it down to its bones. Hardly—if ever—does a poem feel fully finished. Like most art, poems are never “finished” but done once the writer moves on to their next project.
At the same time, revising a poem can also feel tedious, especially when you’ve been reading the same words over and over again. If you find yourself stuck, nursing a bad case of writer’s block, or desperately trying to pump life back into a poem, then fear no more!
Here are thirteen ways to bring energy, purpose, and jolts of life back into any poem, as shared by poet, writer, and educator Freesie McKee on her website.
I originally discovered this list in my freshman-year creative writing poetry class and have found myself returning to it again and again since.
Double the poem
What’s left of the story? What else can you tell? What more do you have to say?
Set a timer (5, 10, 15 minutes) and free-write until it goes off. You can also try approaching the poem from different angles, voices, tones, etc.
Expanding upon the poem offers the chance to unveil a wonderful discovery you hadn’t even known was there, waiting to be found!
Move the end to the beginning
Ever land on a priceless line and notice that it took you the whole poem to get there?
Often it takes a little bit of time to get the gears of our brains turning, maybe a stanza or two to get into the poem’s groove.
Trace your poem’s thoughts from beginning to end, following the story’s movement. Try moving your last lines to the beginning and see what happens when you get to the poem’s final urgent thoughts.
How does moving the end to the start, or vice versa, impact the poem’s storytelling and change the way the poem’s heart beats? What does this transformation offer?
Highlight the best lines
Which parts of the poem tell you everything you need to know?
Read through your poem, isolating the lines you think are strongest. These are the powerhouse behind your poem. Now is the time to be ruthless and merciless. Try pulling out your favorite lines and cutting the rest, considering:
What does the story you’re telling need and/or want?
How can you best serve the poem?
What’s the resulting narrative?
What is lost or gained from the first draft?
Make every word matter, then start over with a new boiled-down draft. (You can always—and should—save the first draft somewhere!)
burning haibun
Popularized by Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the haibun poetic form combines a prose block with a haiku to create a prose poem.
Poet torrin a. greathouse created the burning haibun, an alteration of the haibun that is composed of three parts:
Prose block
Erasure of prose block
Haiku (of remaining words)
Derived from the initial prose block, the haiku serves as a “kind of hidden message, a moment of stark truth concealed beneath the lyricism of the initial text,” writes Greathouse in their essay “Writing from the Ashes: On the Burning Haibun.”
The burning haibun’s series of erasures lends itself to states of memory, making it an experimental storytelling form and unique way to create conversation in one piece.
Create word clusters
If you find yourself getting vocabulary fatigue after lingering on the same lines of one poem, consider making a list of important words that are in the poem, remind you about the poem, or you want to be in a future draft.
Creating your own catalogue of lexicon for the poem can help you brainstorm. You can also think of vivid, active words that do a lot of image work.
What other words should be part of this?
Change modes—pen to computer or vice versa
Feeling stuck? Try another medium.
The modern writer’s reality means staring at a screen for far longer than most of us would like. Looking at the repetitive pixels of a blinking cursor? Nothing close to inspiring.
If you find yourself burnt out on your laptop, switch to paper and pen. (A nice advantage of freewriting with paper and pen is you can’t overthink and backspace.)
Keep going and see where you end up…
A change of scenery never hurt anyone.
Experiment with stanzas
Get creative when revising a poem’s storytelling style. Try experimenting with different forms to see what each offers the piece.
Less restrictive forms, such as free verse or the monostitch—a one-stanza poem consisting of one line—can add fluidity, breath, and a sense of urgency to a poem.
If your poem is in a monostitch, transfer lines into pairs (couplets), tercets (three-line stanzas), quatrains (four-line stanzas), etc. Forms with more structure offer restraint, careful word choice, and rhythmic precision.
If your poem is in a more restrictive form with rhyming end words—such as a ghazal, sestina, or villanelle—then transform it into a form of less structure, such as free verse, to let the poem breathe.
Step outside of your comfort zone structurally and notice how form, white space, and line breaks impact the poem.
Memorize your poem
“There’s something unique about the draft living inside of you,” McKee shares. Memorize the piece, and any weak spots or unbalanced syntax will become noticeable, which will help you know how to trim the poem’s next draft.
Read the poem aloud
You might feel weird, but it’s for a good reason. Read your draft out loud and listen closely to how the words roll off your tongue, how each syllable sounds, and how the poem bounces off the page.
See if there are any words or phrases that trip you up or sound out of place while you recite the poem.
Reading the poem aloud can also help with establishing rhythm and rhyme and build your confidence performing at poetry open mics or spoken performances!
Experiment with verbs
If you’ve stared at a poem long enough for it to become lifeless, try altering verbiage. Highlight all verbs in the poem and change each one. You can also try this exercise but without any repeats.
Inject life back into the poem one word at a time, swapping action words for stronger replacements that do more legwork.
Read it backwards
It sounds silly, but reading your poem backwards (or any piece of writing, for that matter) can be a tremendous help for noticing pesky typos, grammatical errors, and misplaced words.
This exercise can also help you identify issues with syntax and overly repetitive words.
Reading backwards allows us to see patterns, themes, or recurring words we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.
Remove the adjectives/adverbs
Declutter your poem by removing clunky language. If you can remove them without the poem changing its meaning, then they don’t need to be there.
Replace them with specificity that matters, making every word count. Your poem is precious real estate!
Alter the tense
Experimenting with storytelling, time, and tense allows us to play with a poem’s form. For example, what happens when you change a poem in the past tense to the present? You might find a livelier tone, more urgency, and a revived piece!
Change the point of view
I vs. you vs. we vs. us vs. them. Whose voice is heard in the poem? Whose is left out?
Changing the perspective of a poem can make it an entirely different piece. Go with it—explore what unheard voices can offer.
You can also try free-writing, writing the same poem but from another person’s point of view. Jump into their shoes and paint their perspective. How does it complicate the original draft?
Heather Thorn (she/her) is a published poet and writer. Originally from New Jersey, she’s a Creative Writing B.F.A student at Emerson College in Boston, MA, where she focuses on poetry and creative nonfiction. She is the author of one poetry collection,“What Happened Was,” via Bottlecap Press.
