This original poem was the very first poem we submitted for class where we had to write a narrative

poem with a concrete image in every line. Wow, it was really hard revising the really old poems without ditching them entirely. With my lyric poem, I wound up with an entirely brand new poem. For this one, though, I tried to keep the revisions related to each other. The very first revision to the poem (rev. 1) was another assignment we had to do from Writing Poems where we were asked to compress our poems. For this revision, I cut out all adjectives and adverbs and was left with a very choppy but complex sounding poem. At the time, I was impressed with the result because I felt like it was the closest thing Id produced to poetry. The second revision was also another assignment where we had to take our original narrative poem make all of the lines enjambed. After discussing my poem in class a few times I realized what exactly Ron meant when he said I was projecting inwards rather than outwards so that was the main thing I tried to keep in mind when approaching this poem to revise it. This poem is also another example where I explained preceding lines in the ones that proceeded them. For my third revision I decided to take a different perspective (I really enjoyed just playing with perspectives in my revisions). It wound up not even being so much about the nest as it was about the girl in the speakers bed (the speaker is presumably a male). I noticed since the beginning of the semester, when we had to write this very first narrative poem, that I seem to much prefer writing narrative poems to any other styles. Although I liked how the first revision came out, the compressed one, upon re reading it I decided that it just didnt sound like my voice. I think the one thing Im happiest to leave this class with is that I have a way better grasp of what my voice is, and what my style is. I know that the compressed version is closer to the style a lot of other poets write in, but it just didnt come naturally to me and regardless of how much I tried to repeat that, it just wasnt working out. The fourth revision was where I tried doing this, revising the compressed version, so I added more specific details to try to make it more concrete. Rather than saying paint a mask to match todays skin I said, A mask of Buxoms black mascara/and satin lip stain to match todays/heather gray sweater. I also ditched how abstract Time passes, or doesnt sounded and replaced it with a description of an ant carrying a blade of grass. Honestly, I think I just didnt really like this poem at all. I had a very hard time revising it because I just couldnt get in the same mentality I was in when I wrote the poem. I guess rev 3 is probably the one I prefer the most, if I were to continue working on this poem Id probably work off of that one and try to reach an entirely different poem from the very first original. I thought that by ending the third revision with a description of the birds broken beak was way more specific and honestly, kind of ~dramatic~ than just saying the bird cried out, I liked the visual this produced and the tone it ended the poem on. Writing all of these poems has only reaffirmed my obsession with gore (I honestly wish I would have put some more gory details in some of these poems).