Hi Barbara – Glad you found this helpful. I too rarely save drafts since weaning myself off pen and paper some ten years ago, but for this poem I did, for some reason — and I’m glad, because it would’ve been hard to write the post otherwise! I just added a number to the end of file name each time I saved. But since I’m using WordPress, older edits of a page are automatically saved, as well, and I can revert to an earlier version at any time.

Hearing that something I’ve written has made someone take a renewed interest in poetry is just about the most gratifying feedback I can get (though I’m glad you like the poems, too). Thank you.

Oh jesus. How about “Taters,” then?

Tate-ics, to be precise. Since the suffix in alcoholic is “-ic,” not “-aholic.”

Thanks, Peter. You’re right — I don’t have too hard a time jettisoning good lines that don’t fit a poem. And usually I don’t save them in any way, either. I just figure there’s more where that came from.

I love your inner debate, found in your next-to-last paragraph, about first drafts and revisions. I go through the same questions about my writing.

I like the way the debate plays out in your approach to revising “Cocktail Dress.” Anyone who finds reason to give up fine lines like this:

I’ve seen much too much
of that too little.

is serious about revision, I say.

Hi Laurie – Thanks for your kind words. Revision is kind of fun, I guess. I think I revise a lot in my head, which might be why writing first drafts is generally so intense for me.

“Metacognitive” is a great word, Peter, and thanks for the mention of that book — I hadn’t heard of it.

Ordinarily, my approach with posting a revision is to overwrite the original post with it, but that does short-change readers — especially those who’ve already left comments responding to an earlier draft. Also, the practice is somewhat controversial among bloggers, many of whom feel that any change in a published post should be restricted to a duly labled update. It would be great of blog posts were like wiki pages, with a “history” tab linking to earlier versions, and since WordPress already saves multiple versions of each post, they’re already in the database and could probably be summoned up with some fancy code and theme hacks. It would probably slow down site load times considerably, though — you’d have to use a caching plugin.