Poetry Editing

Editorial Services for Poetry

I offer process-oriented revisions. I give tender, but specific and intensive ways to reimagine poems, to bring out the most meaning in poems, and with the most beauty. I have decades of experience with publishing and getting rejections. I understand how hard it is to write a poem. I know the kinds of vulnerabilities it takes to offer your poems for scrutiny.

I’m fast, efficient, and empathetic. I’ve dedicated my life to poetry and have experience and wisdom in many ways of writing it, reading it, and publishing it. Rather than offering a mere “tune-up” of your manuscript, I offer the benefit of this lifetime of experience of living a life in poetry, especially living it outside of academia.

How I Can Help

The poem in the head is always perfect, but often the poem on the page is flat—this creates frustration. I diagnose the reasons why that’s occurring, and minimize or eliminate these obstacles. I help facilitate the process of writing to help make the poem in the mind translate onto the page.

I offer several tiers of editorial services—from a review of a series of poems, to comprehensive manuscript review, to line editing and publication support, and more. My rates are fair and flexible, and I will work with you to find an option that fits what you and your poems need. I offer conferences in person, on telephone, or via FaceTime/Zoom.

How WE CAN get started

Read more about the specific services I offer below. Then send me an email to book a free consultation to talk though your project and how we might proceed.

Some of the services I offer:

• Close readings (explication, exegesis)

• Ordering poems in your manuscript

• MFA application services (including writing sample, where to apply, how to apply, things to consider)

• Detailed letter about your manuscript’s ideas, themes, strengths, problems, form, structure, and tone

• Suggestions for what to read, where to send your work, and how to keep pushing forward

• Literary fixes: driving the manuscript inward, structuring to link memory or lived experience with specific language, infusing static or inert diction with energy

• Help bringing out the poet’s best intention for the poems without imposing my own aesthetics

• Empathic inquiry into waking up all the connections between the deeper subject and feelings

• Encouraging capacity for psychological stamina after inspiration, wherein the writer nurses their strongest feelings

• Skills of deepening oneself in the writing

• Intensive discussion of the long, psychological middle stage of revision

• Line edits: spelling, punctuation, line lengths, line breaks

• Citing wide precedent in other poems for style and content

• Personalized reading list and PDF copies of texts

• Poem-by-poem analysis of what’s happening in terms of layers of meaning, voice, diction and metaphor

• Understanding and navigating the publishing industry

• Understanding how your work is seen, received, and how it relates to other people

• Support with process: making sure the practice sits in the parameters of your life

• Strategies for managing promotion and marketing

• Close readings of specific writers; training in explication de text, a French formalist method of analysis. These are designed to be “Reading Groups for One”

• Craft issues including:

  • The function of poetry, doing everything at once, context, unfolding, untrammeled, words, sentence vs. line, precedent, history / family tree of U.S. poetry from the colonial period until now, continuum, the poet in society, critique and celebration

  • Metaphor, limbo, metonymy, conventional insights vs. surprising insights, risk, clarity, mystery

  • Syntax, diction, rhetoric, withholding, thresholds of known and unknown, declarative sentences, parataxis, compound sentences

  • Free verse, lineation, juxtaposition, inversion, clauses, phrases, predicate adjectives vs. nominative adjectives

  • Rhyme, sound, rhythm, caesura, enjambment, end-stopped, masculine vs. feminine endings, fragments, couplets

  • Meter, scansion, mood, pentameter, blank verse, assonance, constant vs. variant, sonnet, volta, octave vs. sestet, accentual vs. syllabic, meaning and context

  • Diction, concrete vs. abstraction, tropes, figures of thought, figures of speech, symbols, simile, tenor and vehicle, metonymy, allusion

  • Character, voice, psychic distance, rhetorical structure, speaker, dramatic monologue, hyperbole, meiosis

  • Received forms, nonce form, organic form, method, theme, allusion, tension, restrictions

  • Experiment, sound, sense, rhythm

  • Creative reading, stunt doubles, intention, difficulty