Parodies Lost

I've been fortunate enough to have a poem accepted to Hagios Press's new anthology Fast Forward: Saskatchewan's New Poets (Spring 2007), and it reminded me how complicated the revision and editing process gets for poetry. N0t that it isn't difficult for fiction, or any kind of writing, really - just coming off a thesis which seemed to be made up of endless revisions tells me that.

But poetry revision is alarmingly like Tetris. You change a word, one word, and everything shifts. You move something and it changes the way the lines look, the way words sit next to one another, the way they sound. Then you start moving other words, shifting line breaks, re-thinking word choices, and before you know it ... chaos. Or creativity. Depending how you look at it. It's one of the best parts of working with words on a page.