One of the earliest revision exercises I remember experimenting with in my early days of writing poetry was to write an existing poem in reverse, a tactic, it turns out, that has variety of approaches:
- Writing a poem backwards, literally word for word, perhaps adjusting grammar and syntax to accommodate the new structure, perhaps not.
- Writing a poem backwards line by line, adjusting for grammar and syntax along the way, or not.
- Writing a poem in reverse stanza by stanza (stanzas retain their line order, but the order of the stanzas are reversed).
- Leaving each line in place but reverse the order of the words.
- Leaving each stanza in place but reversing the order of the lines.
- Writing a poem in reverse in terms of imagery (last image first, first image last).
The point really is not to write perfectly reversed poem to show that you are able to follow instructions correctly, though that may be the end result, but to rearrange the ways we see and interpret the poem and how it works and to follow where new discoveries lead. To allow the poem to lead rather than to impose meaning on the poem.
The Zingara Project 