POETRY WORKSHOP
Before and after
When is a poem finished? Alison Chisholm fine-tunes a competition winner to see if it might benefit from any further revisions
E
very poet who is serious about their craft appreciates the value of revision. This process takes the rough notes and scribbles of a first draft and transforms them, bit by bit, into a cohesive poem. Over a period of time, anything ranging from a few days to several years, more polished work emerges until finally its author decides it is ready to meet its public.
That is the pivotal moment, and brings a new question to be answered. Is the piece now fixed permanently, never to be altered, or could it still be adjusted? Is anyone else’s suggestion to make adjustments to the writing still worthy of consideration? We have to remember that if there are two different versions of a poem in print, future readers will never know which was the preferred one; but if the new version is better, why would we want the original to be retained?
It could be argued that success for a poem, in terms of acceptance for publication or a competition award, means that it needs no further work, but offering an accepted poem for additional input is a powerful challenge. It’s a challenge that poet Elizabeth Horrocks of Wilmslow, Cheshire responded to with her poem Penelope.