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.
From your seat in a leather desk chair, you gaze out the window in your writing room. The wind chimes you bought when you moved into this house have lost the clapper during the past winter, and the black enamel has eroded, leaving the silver tubes exposed to the havoc of blizzards and storms. You have not heard the instrument’s melodies since your last German shepherd passed. In mid afternoon a finch alights on the aging deck to perch on a post beside the chimes in order to survey the sky for red-tailed hawks and the terrain for cats before flying into a viburnum. After this year’s finch flutters away, you continue to read from Moby Dick and an anthology of movie poems. Films you would call them, if you were a cineast. For weeks, you’ve wondered if the white whale has been retired from the literary canon as you drew near to the end of the book without any of the ambushes you would expect from Jaws or the squid attacks in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. On your porch the finch skips back into the sunlight, and you notice its feathers shedding February browns in favor of the radiance from an April sunbeam. The bird chirps a song you can hear through closed storm windows. Just such a finch has visited your springs throughout the lives of all the German shepherds you have companioned. Perhaps the absence of the Leviathan in your adventures turns you toward an enigma that might be kindness. Toward a silent conundrum that might even be joy.
Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won a 
The Zingara Project 