Revision Process

[ellajam]

Achebe wrote:

So back on track: I think revisions get fewer comments because most of what needed to be said, has been said in the response to the original, and at least in my mind, it doesn't feel egalitarian to bump up a thread which already has a lot of comments on it, and which the commenting process always does, at the expense of more recent posts with fewer ones.

I am one of those people that love every speck of crit I receive and am intrigued by the challenge to use it. I often try to stuff too many ideas into one piece so cuts and changes can have a major impact on the poem. If no one came back to comment on whether the poem improved or became totally devoid of life and sense I would be back on my own. Follow-up crit is vital for me, many of my threads are pages long as I poke the poor thing either to death or to a better poem.

I don't think a thread that gets a lot of posts takes anything away from new threads. If someone is moved to comment on one they may comment on two or three while they're at it. Being interested in one poem makes me want to read and comment on others, I sort of get into critique mode.

I do find it a little odd that sometimes a thread where the OP has never come back gets continual crit but I guess it's a poem people want to comment on anyway, but as long as the OP is active I don't see any problem with keeping it going. Some of those long threads where the poem goes through interesting changes are the ones I reread and continually learn from whether they're my own threads or the poems of other members. For me they're the treasures of the site whether it is me bumbling along or watching some of our better poets deftly pick just the right edits first time around.