We've talked about what poetry should be, what poets should do -- but for me there's also the fact of what actually happens when I read my own writing: I tend to read what I meant to write, rather than what actually got onto the page. Simple things like pronoun reference can screw things up, or misplaced modifiers -- and these make a difference in meaning or, at the very least, in the reader's sense of the writer's engagement. And that's prose. With poetry the opportunities to read the feelings I put into it, rather than the feelings that stuck, can be overwhelming. So if the careful readers here do nothing more than make me see what I've actually written, they've done enough.
Richard
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