Purpose, there is a purpose?

[Silven]

I know it is a bit of a strech to imagine a purpose for a poetry editing fourm. Look at it like this, editing poetry happens before it is written. Interesting concept, no? I think poetry is edited before it is written because the poet must choose their form and style. How poetry is written is verry important and specific to each poet.

 

Verse number, meter, rhyme, wording...... these are all part of poetry editing. Really undertsanding how each works and what they are best at accomplishing is what poetry editing is all about. I know, some would say it is a personal matter. I agree to a point, however, there is always room for growth and improvement.

 

What say you?

[Camy]

I know it is a bit of a strech to imagine a purpose for a poetry editing fourm. Look at it like this, editing poetry happens before it is written. Interesting concept, no? I think poetry is edited before it is written because the poet must choose their form and style. How poetry is written is verry important and specific to each poet.

 

Verse number, meter, rhyme, wording...... these are all part of poetry editing. Really undertsanding how each works and what they are best at accomplishing is what poetry editing is all about. I know, some would say it is a personal matter. I agree to a point, however, there is always room for growth and improvement.

 

What say you?

Personally I don't think poetry requires editing. It is, as you've said, a very personal affair.

 

What is does require is work. To get a stanza right can be far more time consuming than most people think, and even then it often only makes sense to the poet himself. Most poetry could be punctuated, some is, some isn't and that's the poets' choice.

 

My 'poetry' happens very quickly. I write it for me. If others like it great, and if they don't then I'm not really bothered.

 

If I had to involve an editor then the process would become far too lengthy - for me. This is not to say that a poet/editor relationship wouldn't work for some poets.

 

Prose fiction is a completely different barrel of kelp.

 

Camy

[Silven]

Personally I don't think poetry requires editing. It is, as you've said, a very personal affair.

 

What is does require is work. To get a stanza right can be far more time consuming than most people think, and even then it often only makes sense to the poet himself. Most poetry could be punctuated, some is, some isn't and that's the poets' choice.

 

That is what I was talking about. You do the editing while you write the poetry. You are right on when you say poetry is a personal affair. My poetry is a lot of times the only way i know how to express mself.

 

Silven

[Demetz]

You can edit poetry, but if you're like me you get to a point where everytime you look at it you'll want to change something and at some point you have to just let it be what it is.

 

As for the devlopment phase... sometimes I have an idea of what I want it to look like... but a lot of times it just flows as it wills and what I want it to look like is shaped by the words that come, not the other way around. I absolutely hated it when in classes I would be told to conform to some predetermined rhyme, rhythm or number of syllables/lines.... thats just too constraining.

[Bondwriter]

Ezra Pound edited TS Eliot's poetry, by having him remove pages at a time (The manuscript of the Waste Land is impressive in this regard). I wrote poetry for a magazine with friends for a couple years, and quite often we had each other remove lines, stanzas, or even discard whole poems.

I've found out that I always tended to have "summarizing lines" at the end of the poem that were quite superfluous. But it's quite a difficult task to edit somebody else's poems.