My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.