Editing is writing

I’ve long since thought that putting words down on page in a First-Draft is the only writing that really counts and the rest is fluff. But Editing-A-Poem is as much of a discipline as writing a poem from scratch. It is where you find the best Poetic-form for your piece, where you interrogate the work and find out what you want to say.

We [[ learn by repetition ]] so by rewriting and editing the same piece we can clarify our thinking.

Revision is a tool we should value as highly as drafting, if not more so—revision is our chance to get our poems closer to the ideal we imagine, to communicate more perfectly with our readers. — Rachel Richardson, The Warmth of the Messy Page