So the process I've been describing has largely been working from the assumption that your first draft or your early drafts have been written from instinct or from a burst of inspiration or just the kind of outpouring of emotion and language and ideas. Right, but what if you're the kind of writer who really likes to begin from a formal space? Maybe, when we started talking about meter and rhythm, maybe you chose one of those prompts and said oh my goodness, this is what I've needed to do all this time. I've needed to write in blank verse. Right? Form is one way of thinking about refining a poem. If you begin from the standpoint of form, look for lines that feel like the form is dictating the poem, and not the other way around. A lot of times, working for a particular meter, we find that we pad our lines with additional syllables, because we've got to make sure that we have ten, if we're doing pentameter. At that point, look for those moments where the poem seems to be performing the form more than adapting the form for itself. This can be a hard distinction to make. But perhaps the most important thing I can say right now is that there's no such thing as a natural, organic poem. "But Doug, I'm not trying to be phony!". "This is the outpourings of my very soul!". "This is my purest form of feeling!". And I say to that, nonsense. The purest form of your feeling doesn't even have language. It would be like [SOUND] yellow sweater [SOUND] traffic. [SOUND] "Daddy, daddy, daddy!". That would be something closer to the purest outpouring of your soul. Half of the things that would be in that soul of yours we don't even have keys on our keyboards to deliver. A poem is art, and art, folks, is artifice. If you want something natural, go outside and look at a forest. It's there for you. But a poem isn't natural. A poem is a trick. It's a way of making somebody feel like this thing that you've labored over, this thing that you've spent hours and hours potentially dreaming up, refining and agonizing over, just came out. Even a formal poem that wears its formality on its sleeve can sometimes become tedious. The formal poem that tells you, "Hey look, I am an iambic pentameter," is oftentimes not that pleasurable to listen to. The formal poem that manages to seem as though these were the only ways for these words to come together, that the rhyme and that the meter is almost accidental, is oftentimes a more pleasurable read.