A poem rarely arrives finished. It arrives as a lump of language with something worth keeping buried inside it, and the work of editing is finding out what that something is, then clearing away everything that gets in its way.

Order matters here. If you polish commas before you have settled the shape of the thing, you will spend an hour buffing a line you later cut. Work through these seven steps in sequence, and the last pass becomes almost easy.

1. Read It Aloud Before You Change a Word

Stand up. Read it slowly, at the pace of speech, not the pace of thought. Your mouth will find the problems before your eye does: the phrase you stumble over, the line where you run out of breath, the place where your voice flattens because nothing is happening. Mark these with a pencil in the margin. Do not fix anything yet. You are only collecting evidence.

Reading aloud also reveals the poem's true length. Plenty of drafts are two lines longer than they need to be, and you will hear that as a slight trailing off at the end.

2. Interrogate the Line Breaks

Line breaks are the poem's punctuation and its pacing. Each one is a decision, so ask of every break: what does this do? Look at the difference here.

The kitchen light stayed on all night
and I didn't call.

The kitchen light stayed on
all night, and I didn't call.

The first version puts weight on night. The second holds on for a beat and lets the line break do the hesitating. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same poem. If every line ends where a sentence ends, the poem will feel flat and predictable. If every line breaks mid-phrase, the reader gets exhausted by constant enjambment.

Two further checks: a line ending on a weak word — the, and, of — is a deliberate trick and quickly becomes a tic if overused. And if you can guess the last word of a line before you reach it, the break is doing nothing.

3. Test the Rhythm

Read the poem again, this time tapping the table on each stressed syllable. You are not looking for perfect metre; you are looking for consistency of feel. A poem that falls into the same pattern line after line turns into a drone, and a poem with no pattern at all gives the reader nothing to lean on.

Now hunt the padding. Words like just, very, really, that, somehow and suddenly are usually rhythm's way of filling a gap your sentence did not need. Compare:

• I just really couldn't believe that you were gone.
• I couldn't believe you were gone.

The second is shorter, stronger, and the stresses land where they should. Free verse still has rhythm — it comes from syntax, line length and repetition — so this step matters whether or not you are writing in metre.

4. Pressure-Test the Imagery

Two questions for every image. First: is it working, or is it decorating? Second: does it belong to this poem's world? A poem can hold a moon, a river, a mirror and a bird, but that is four competing universes. Choose one and let it earn its place.

Watch for abstraction. Abstract nouns — love, loss, hope, freedom, sadness — tell the reader what to feel. Images let them feel it. "I was lonely" is a report. "I ate standing at the counter, the plate still warm from the dishwasher" is a scene. Also check for mixed metaphor: the ship of my heart ran aground in a sea of paperwork is three images fighting in one sentence.

5. Hunt Down the Clichés

Clichés are not only phrases. They are also shapes, rhythms and openings you have absorbed from other poems. The usual suspects:

• the whispering wind, silent tears, a heart of gold, cold as ice
• eyes like oceans, dawn breaking, the weight of the world, time standing still
• poems that begin "I remember", or end on a rhetorical question
• poems about writing poems, and poems whose last line explains the rest

A useful test: could this phrase appear on a birthday card, a fridge magnet or a chorus? Then it is dead language. It may have been a useful placeholder while you were drafting — that is fine. Now replace it with something you have actually noticed, in your own words, from your own street.

6. Cut the Weakest Line, Then Another

Go through the poem line by line and cover each one with your thumb. If the poem survives without it, it stays covered. Most drafts lose five to fifteen per cent this way and get better for it.

Two places to be ruthless. The first line often clears its throat — try starting at line two. The final line often ties a neat bow on something better left open; the real ending is frequently two lines earlier than you think. Keep everything you cut in a separate file. Half of it will be useful in another poem, and deleting it entirely makes you timid.

7. Read It Aloud Again, Then to Someone Else

Read the edited version to a listener, without apologising or explaining first. Watch their face rather than their words. Ask one question only: "Where did you stop seeing it?" Do not ask whether they liked it; that answer tells you nothing you can use.

Notice, too, where you run out of breath and where you speed up to get through a passage. Both are signals of weak writing, not weak lungs.

A Final Practical Pass

Now leave it alone. A week at minimum, longer if you can bear it. When you come back, your ear will be less forgiving and more accurate. Then run the last checks:

1. Tense consistency — has the poem slipped from past to present without meaning to?
2. Punctuation policy — either punctuate fully or use it sparingly, but be consistent throughout.
3. Unintentional repeats — search for and, like, still, always and cut what is only habit.
4. The title — does it add something, or merely label the poem? A title that repeats the first line wastes its space.
5. Read it backwards, last line first, to catch typos. You stop reading for sense and start seeing the words.

Then stop. A poem edited past its life becomes tidy and dead. If you can no longer find anything to fix, you are finished — and finished is a perfectly good place to leave it.

Photo: Sarah Dietz / Pexels