Rachel Medhurst recently submitted a poem called 'Who Am I?'.
"I often just write", she said, "what i think and feel without second guessing it, if you have any advice on how to make a poem flow a bit better it would be appreciated".

I'm sure we've mentioned this before at unheardwords, some might say it's an obsession but at the risk of repetition I'm going to state it again, here goes, most writing requires editing.  Now -this is unheardwords, and personally, I'd rather see people write then worry about how they format what they write, so don't get me wrong.  What I'm talking about is writing that you'd like others to read and hopefully be engaged by.

Here's the original piece:

I liked and appreciated the free flowing vibrance of this poem, though I felt it started to deviate from its course as it hit the 'I need something to appease my soul' line.  There and then I felt it beginning to run away from its author, as it picked up speed and made a life for its own self.  And, this can be a good thing, though when the poem starts to write the author, there's a strong likelihood it'll all end in revisiting your core idea.  Still, given the great starting point and the strength of the overall concept, I felt this was a relatively easy piece to offer revision advice on.

That advice rested on three things: reading the poem aloud to myself, this gave a sense of the flow and natural ending of lines; creating structure, dividing up the poem, in an effort to bring clarity (both look and read) and to introduce distinct pauses; finally, pruning connections that over-connected, all the while trying to maintain the poem's themes.

Here's the suggested re-work:

Is the suggested revision betta? I'll let you be the judge. Regardless of this, the most important lesson concerns the need to be prepared to edit those words, not too much, but just enough to make them work.