Stanza Is Another Name for Room

Revise a poem by reorganizing its stanzas considering how each choice affects the poem’s structure, language, syntax, continuity, rhythm, chronology, and imagery as you work.

Some approaches worth exploring include:

• Breaking a single-stanza poem into multiple stanzas.
• Conversely, placing a multi-stanza poem into a single stanza.
• Creating uniform stanzas that contain the same number of lines: couplets, tercets, quatrains, quintains, sestets, octets, Spencerian (9-line stanza), or dizains.
• Disrupting uniform stanzas by varying the number of lines in each one.
• Creating a pattern using indentation. For example, indent every other line of a stanza or every other stanza; center some lines but not others; use right marginalization, etc.
• Rearranging the stanzas — backward, forward, from the inside out.
• Experimenting with multiple approaches then returning the poem to its original form but with new content created during the process.

As you might guess, the goal is to discover the poem’s “about-ness” through serious play and experimentation. Aim for process rather than product, change over predictability.