#1 (On revision...)

I've been thinking about revision a lot this week as I prepared my final workshop materials in preparation for my final project. The main revision that I would like to focus on is for "The ones who love you." I got a lot of comments on my revised draft that people loved the changes that I made, so that was great to see. Obviously, the most noticeable change was in the overall formatting. I kept the anaphora, but decided that establishing one instance and then either supporting or undermining that instance would be a more exciting engagement with the reader than the original one-liners. The hardest part for me came when establishing the rhythm and rhyme of the piece. I had some inherent in the first draft, and then was able to add some to the beginning of the second to make it a somewhat standardized pattern. However, I ran into issues when I liked the phrasing of some of the retorts later in the piece and couldn't rephrase them without sounding forced. After struggling with this for awhile, I decided to surrender the second draft as it was, with a rearranged form and an incomplete sound. In order for this poem to feel complete to me, I will need to either add the sounds where they are required or take all of the sounds out. This is all to say that I have definitely learned that the revision process is not something easily done. It is more akin to lions fighting over a scrap of meat, except both of the lions embody two opposing views of the writer, and the meat could be as small as a comma or as large as an entire poem. Either way, revision is brutal.