revision: poetry vs. plays

When it comes to poetry, my relationship with revising my own work has changed over the years. When I first started, I drafted on paper--usually whatever was at hand, which would have been the backs of leftover handouts and lined notebook paper. I'd then type them up, first on an electric typewriter I'd bought with my high school graduation money. Later on a word processing machine that saved to floppy discs. i would typically do some revising as I went, which meant a lot of messy cross-outs, white-out, and other telltales of previous versions. as I transitioned to typing poems in an electronic document, revision happened in both places--as I drafted in ink and when I typed up the piece to send it out. By the time I moved fully to composing on a keyboard, the revision happened much more in the flow of the writing hitting the page. I would go back later and change some things--usually clunkiness, typos, or unecessary repetition. I rarely revised much after this initial getting down.…