Revision Process

[ellajam]

And I admit, I mostly favor the ones who go out on a limb, alone, and write good stuff from that alien terrain.

This is what I feel like I SHOULD be doing -- going it alone. That ideal of self-sufficiency gets me every time. I want help and yet I resist it at the same time because I feel like I should be able to do it myself.

I went it alone most of my life. Since hanging out here and putting some poems under the microscope and thinking a lot harder about other people's poems, I find that when I go it alone, as we all do at the birth of a poem anyway, the result is more appealing to me, I catch a better way to say it before it hits the page and I feel like my reach is a little longer. I like what the workshopping process has done for and to me. I write some dead stuff with good technique now but I always wrote an unknown percentage of shit. I think my strong ones are stronger now.