In his autobiography World within World, Stephen Spender says that the art in which you hope to excel is the one for which you are willing to take immense pains over detail. I've had that same thought ~ when I'm working on a poem, every comma is a matter of consequence, every line break worth infinite thinking & rethinking. For most that I do "good enough" is good enough but in poetry, I not only take time, I love to keep turning the poem around & around. When I was writing So Late into the Night, I kept thinking up new challenges, so that I could keep rewriting it with additional strictures in the form.
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