On drafting - a year of poetry epip...efip...thought.

I am going to be honest here.

Up until yesterday I was a rather linear drafter.   I suspect this comes from my schooling and from work; having to proof things and where you are really focused on pushing or taking a document in one direction.

After reading Creating Poetry by Ron Pretty, in particular the section on drafting, I experimented in redrafting a poem that in truth, I was pretty much finished with.  The idea here was to explore the possibilities in the poem or try and see if I could take it in another direction.

Now that may lead nowhere or somewhere weird and uncomfortable or I might just write the best thing I have done to date.  The important thing though was I think to break away, at least a little, from that linear focus which narrows a poem as I go further down the track.

So my question to you readers is, do your draft linearly aiming generally in one direction or have you experimented, turning a poem on it's head going in multiple directions?

And another question: do you think typing directly in a digital document influences this?

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