[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by John Isbell

I've pretty much been writing a poem a day since 2012. Not always good or long ones, but it's a useful discipline for me.

Do you rewrite? How much time do you devote to rewriting? Do you go over poems again before you submit? Do you revisit them? Is the emphasis on getting out a poem a day, or on writing the best possible poem you can. Is that morning spent writing the poem just the very start of the creative process, or is each poem essentially done - bango - on to the next - every day? Do you rewrite and rethink when you transfer the poem to the computer?

Personally. I think that the working and reworking and rereworking the poem - and then putting it aside for a month and reworking again - the amount of effort you put into a poem before you think it's possibly ready - is a lot more important than whether you use a 2H pencil or where and how you write. And I have the feeling that more members than usual are putting up early drafts, and depending too much on the Sphere to help finish the poem. One of the dangers of the Sphere is that it encourages this.

I'm at my own nutty end of the spectrum. I have a dozen or more poems in process at a time, I may not look at one for a month or more and then go back to it, I rarely "finish" a poem in less than a month from when I first had the idea, and it's often a year, I'm lucky if I grind out a poem a month that I'm happy with - I look at possible rewrites every time I submit - and I never stop kicking at the tires. And then I post a poem from time to time, and still get good suggestions and make changes.