How to Work with a Poetry Editor: What Poets Need to Know, with Orna Ross—Self-Publishing Poetry Podcast

Joining Orna Ross in this month's #AskALLi Self-Publishing Poetry Salon is Jon Davis, Bookfox's Poetry Editor and author of five chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections. Jon received the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a GE Younger Writers Award, the Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He also served as the City of Santa Fe’s fourth Poet Laureate from 2013-2015.

Together, Orna and Jon discuss editing a poem, a chapbook and a full collection. They will also explore the different kinds of poetry editing:

• developmental
• line editing
• proofreading

Tune in for discussions on a different theme each month with a focus on developing prosperity for poets through community building and self-publishing.

Listen to the Podcast: Poetry Editor

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Watch the Video: Poetry Editor

On the #AskALLi Self-Publishing Poetry #podcast, join @OrnaRoss and poet Jon Davis for a discussion on how to work with a #poetry editor. #amediting #indiepublishing Share on X

Show Notes

Strategies for Revising Poems, by Jon Davis (PDF)

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About the Host

Orna Ross: Orna’s work for ALLi has seen her repeatedly named one of The Bookseller’s “Top 100 people in publishing.” She launched at the 2012 London Book Fair, after taking her rights back from Penguin in 2011 and republishing her books herself, with the titles and treatment she’d originally wanted. Orna writes award-winning poetry and fiction, runs a Patreon page for poets and poetry lovers as well as an active author website. She is on a mission to help eradicate creative poverty through digital publishing and enterprise. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: @ornaross.

Read the Transcripts: Poetry Editor

Orna Ross: Hi everyone. Hello. Time for another AskALLi Self-Publishing Advice Poetry podcast.

I am here this evening to talk about a topic that I know is of interest to a lot of you, which is editing poetry, and the demands of that, and the joys of that.

I'm here with Jon Davis who is an established poet himself, a prize-winning poet, but also a poetry editor.

Hi, Jon.

Jon Davis: Hello Orna, how're you?

Orna Ross: I'm good. How are you over there in, where exactly are you?

Jon Davis: I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it is currently snowing. The day before yesterday you could have worn shorts and a t-shirt, and now it is 20 degrees and snowing.

Orna Ross: Summer is over, winter is here. Well, we get a long slow, kind of, autumn between those two things.

Jon Davis: Yeah, we're supposed to.

Orna Ross: Oh dear. Well, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us about poetry editing. It's a topic that our poetry listeners have wanted us to tackle for a while, but before we get stuck into it, just talk to me, tell the people a little bit about you as a poet. Every poet is so different, so talk to us a little bit about your genre, about your teaching experience, I know you have a lot of teaching experience, and about how you came to editing and why you do it, why you enjoy it.

Jon Davis: I started, kind of unusually for somebody who ends up being a literary poet, I was a construction worker, I was 19, and I think it was probably Bob Dylan and Neil Young and, you know, the folk rock musicians who got me interested in words. So, then I started writing and just filling up notebooks, and at first, I had no idea what I was doing, but I got really interested in poetry. So, I started reading and then once I started reading, I started imitating, like, what are these people doing?

I figured it out on my own, started publishing, and then when I was 26, I got into college; I sent a letter to a poet who taught at a school, I lived in Connecticut at the time, sent a letter to him with some poems and said I wanted to go to school, this was my idea of getting into school, and he loved the poems and he said, come and take any course you want. And that was the beginning of my college career, which continued on until I got an MFA at the university of Montana. So, I did it backwards, but it was good because when I went in, I knew what I wanted to resist and what I wanted to accept. I kind of knew what I wanted from poetry. So, it worked.

Orna Ross: I think it's a better way around, actually, than the normal trajectory, because I think once you have the experience of actually doing it, that you'd get a lot more value out of it. The trouble with a lot of MFA is it stifles the creativity, it can, I mean, not necessarily, but it can do for a lot of people.

Jon Davis: Yeah. Especially if you're younger. I mean, the successful MFA students generally are older, have been out in the world and come back to school. That used to be the model, like going straight through was very unusual when I was going to school.

So, then I started teaching at Salisbury University in Maryland and I taught there for a couple of years. And then I came to Santa Fe and I got a job at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I loved it right away. I stayed there for 23 years, teaching poetry. At the undergraduate level we had amazing successes with students, and then I started a graduate program. I started an MFA program, and that was exhausting, but it was rewarding because it was a group of people, native Americans, who were not largely often represented in MFA programs, and it was people who came with a lot of experience to the work, and so it had that quality too, that I was talking about.

Then I retired, and now that I'm retired, I'm working harder than ever. Part of it's editing for Bookfox, which has been a lot of fun and, just the diversity of poetry, that I didn't get in the MFA. So, I've learned about things that I had no idea about originally.

And then I'm also writing a non-fiction book, and my own poetry.

Orna Ross: So, you're still busy, you're not retired at all?

Jon Davis: No. I keep joking, I have to retire from my retirement.

Orna Ross: Absolutely. Okay. So, today we're going to talk specifically, we could go so many different ways with this, but specifically how to work with an editor, as a poet, as a self-publishing poet, particularly. How to work with an editor to get the most value from that relationship.

We will look at developmentally working with poetry, then, you know, the copy edit and the proofreading down at the, kind of, word level, and we'll look at the poem itself, chapbooks and editing a full collection, because these are all different kinds of editing.

So, we've got a lot to get through, and you also made the kind invitation that if somebody wants to drop a short poem into the comments here, that you might be able to do a surface first-read and editorial commentary if that is useful or of interest.

What to be aware of when sending work to a poetry editor

Orna Ross: So, can we start, just talking about poetry, you know, developmentally. When you get a poem first of all, what's the first thing you do, and what should our poets be aware of when they are sending the poem to an editor?

Jon Davis: Right. Well, the first thing, and I've learned this, is it's really important to know what the author intends. So, I get a certain number of poets who clearly have their eye on the literary market, you know, the journals. Not everybody wants that, but I can tell pretty quickly who those people are, and I know exactly where to go. So, there'll be a different process with them.

And then I have certain number, I have quite a few, like therapists, people involved in, kind of, spiritual thinking, and so that's another different approach. Often, those are Haiku poets who are, kind of, writing brief poems that are trying to transmit a message, but poetically, not as academics.

And then I have, you know, poets in the vein say, Rupi Kaur, poets who are writing about personal things, and they're not all headed in the same direction.

And so, the first thing to determine is, what do you want as a writer from your poem? Do you want to self-publish? Do you want to seek publishing? Do you want to follow the literary path?

So, at first, it took me a while to sort those out, and there's other kinds of poetry too. There are people who are writing performance poetry, so you need to know what they want from their work, and then once I have that, then I go at it a different way for each kind of territory.

But for those who are writing in more of the Rupi Kaur, or the, kind of, self-help or inspirational verse, it's more about taking some of the qualities of a literary poet, you know, looking closely at word choice, looking closely at what a line is for you, what is the shape of the poem; I'm looking closely at the use of imagery.

So, it's the same things I would look at with an academic, but it doesn't have the same pressure on it. But all those techniques can be useful; clarity, you know, clearing up passages that are muddy, all of that, and then the totality of the poem, like where is it going, and has it gotten there, or where do you want it to go, and can we get it to arrive there?

So, that's the first thing, it's determining what you want.

So, often I'll ask now. In the beginning, I tried to assume, but I think it's much better to ask, as an editor, to say, okay, what do you want to do with these poems? And so that's been my process initially.

Orna Ross: And do people send you one poem? Do they send you, you know, a chapbook size collection, what do you tend to get?

Jon Davis: I get everything. John Fox who runs Bookfox knows what he's doing, and he doesn't allow me really to do under 10 poems. So, if somebody comes in and they send me one poem, you know, he says, just tell them, keep writing and when you get 10 send them on to me, 10 pages of poetry. And that's been a good process, I think, and some people have said, okay, I'll be back. Don't worry. I'll be back, I'm going to do this. So, 10 is actually my favorite, because it usually means I'm getting somebody kind of early in their writing career and I can kind of make some corrections and some course adjustments, some larger course adjustments, so that as they move towards the chapbook and the book, they've already had some preparation for the kinds of changes they'll need to make. But having said that, I do get chapbooks and books, and the only difference really with a chapbook and a book, is that then you need to look at the shape of the book and the shape of the chapbook. Why is this a chapbook? You know, is there a unifying, especially with Chapbooks, because they're so short, is there a unifying style? Is there a unifying message? So, I look at that and I look at the order, and why this order, you know, what's the development here. And there's no answer to that unless you look at each checkbook individually. It really is an individual art, and you have to look at it that way.

And books can be more varied, you know, you can have sections in a book or, you know, basically each section can be like a chapbook on its own, but with a chapbook I like to look for some sort of unifying reason that it's a chapbook.

How to get the most from a relationship with a poetry editor

Orna Ross: And in terms of what a poet needs to be aware of, in terms of working with an editor, do you have any tips for poets as to how to get the most out of the relationship?

Jon Davis: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's two things right away. One is that, you know, let the editor know where you're headed, I think that's really important.

I'd rather follow that early on. I saw somebody who was writing, she was a therapist and she was writing, kind of, self-help poetry, but I saw literary qualities and I started pushing that direction, but she didn't really want to go there, and so I figured that out. So, tell the editor what you want. If you're a literary poet, tell them, you know, tell them, this is where I want to go. If you're not, tell them where you want to go. That's done.

The second thing that I find useful is, especially with the 10 poem package that we do, I offer, at half the price of the first edit, to look at him again, and that's been the most useful thing for the poets who have done that. And it's the most useful thing for me, because then I can say, okay, you know, this advice was good advice. Or sometimes I'll say, I thought that was a good idea, but it's not. Because sometimes you can't tell until the poems are reconstituted, following whatever ideas you had. So, I would totally recommend that as a practice.

Orna Ross: And it sounds very much like your editing is closely aligned to your teaching, you know, that you see editing almost as a teaching process, it's not just simple feedback on word choice or whatever, it's like, you're trying to encourage the development of the poet, as well as the poem it sounds like, is that right?

Jon Davis: Yeah, I mean, at Bookfox, I just do the whole thing and it's developmental, it's line editing and proofreading at the same, just one big thing. But I pretty much always sent out poems by poets that I think the poet will resonate with, because that's the way I learned. I wrote something and they said, well, I really love this poem, why do I love it? And I went and looked at the poem and saw what that poet was doing, and I tried to incorporate that into my work. So, I do that for every poet who sends me work and now I have a whole collection of my resources, and I have a collection of poems that I can just pull out that I've already kind of done; copied and pasted. So, I think that's a useful thing. And then in my letter to the poets, I always say, okay, here's what you do and here's the habits you have that are good, and here are the habits  that have, that are kind of working against you. Becoming a good poet is kind of like becoming a better person, you know, you notice, Oh man, I did that again, you know, I was mean to that woman, I was mean to that man, or I snapped, you know, or something, you know, you did something that you shouldn't have done.

And so, you recognize your habit, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to correct that. So, I always say that, yeah, it's just like trying to be a better person, trying to be a better poet. And that's what I love about it, about editing, working with poets.

How can poets prepare themselves to receive feedback from a poetry editor?

Orna Ross: You make it sound like a really enjoyable experience. Do you ever find poets that submit the work, but don't really want the feedback? How can a poet prepare themselves to receive the feedback in the best possible way?

Yeah, I just had that one poet who wanted to go in one direction and I tried to push her in one direction that she didn't want to go in, and I don't do that anymore. Now I ask. That was the only person who did not accept the feedback, but everybody else, you know, I try to present the feedback. I mean, one of the things I say is, there's a lot of comments on this poem, but there aren't as many comments as there are on my own poems. So, you know, as I try to work through my own poems, I'm like really tough on myself.

Jon Davis: But it's not required that you take the feedback. It's your job as the writer, because you know where you're going, not to necessarily get offended by the feedback, but just to say, I'm going to pull this, I'm going to take this, I'm not going to take this, and then I encourage people to write back to me with questions.

So, sometimes the questions I get are, I understand this, this, and this, but why did you tell me to do this? You know, and I'll write back and say. So yeah, accept the feedback, and I think most editors will listen to you if you email them back and reconsider or contextualize the feedback.

Orna Ross: I think that's quite interesting because I think it really only happens, in my experience, as far as I have seen, that tends to really only happen with poetry editing, not for longer work like novels or long non-fiction books, the editor sends the edit and then the author works with the edit and on they go and, you know, they're happy with it or not, but maybe okay {inaudible} question, why this, or why that, but not so much.

I assume with poetry editors, it can almost turn into a dialogue, you know, a very interesting dialogue and a learning and teaching, on both sides and in quite a different way. You do some editing of other forms as well, not just poetry?

Jon Davis: Right. Yeah, I do developmental work on novels and I've edited novels for years for friends, and some of them have done really well. I worked with Tommy Orange on a book called, There There, which has been an international bestseller. That was the line by line editing, and it was more like editing poetry with him, because he writes a very poetic novel.

But I do a lot of developmental editing through Bookfox as well and I also taught screenwriting for ABC Disney for a while. So, I had that kind of structural training. So, a novelist will come to me, just read this and see if it has dramatic structure, you know, because novels tend not to, at least literary novelists tend to follow the story through the characters, and so a lot of times they don't really even know if there's any shape to their novel. So, that's been useful.

What’s the difference between a fiction editor and a poetry editor?

Orna Ross: Okay. What is the difference between editing fiction and editing poetry?

Jon Davis: Oh, it's just that intense concentration in poetry, word choice first, you know, because sometimes you're dealing with 40 words, they all have to be right. Condensation is really important in poetry too, I think, you know, no matter what kind of poetry anyone is writing, someone who chooses poetry is looking for some kind of succinct way of saying something very large. And so, that focus on condensation, which means you have to focus on word choice…line breaks are a complicated thing to look at-

How do you know when a line break doesn’t work?

Orna Ross: Sorry, did you say line breaks? Talk to me a little bit about line breaks, because that is something I think that editors give a lot of…a lot of feedback can center, after word choice, it's probably, line break is the next quality that's most worked on.

Talk to us a little bit about, how do you know the break doesn't work and should change?

Jon Davis: Yeah, well, I have a lot of theories about it. So, if you're writing rhyme poetry, you know, where the line breaks with the rhyme, rhyme poetry is really difficult to work on as an editor, especially if the poem's gone wrong, badly wrong, because then you, kind of, have to ignore the rhymes and say, there's all these other problems in your poem. You know, most people who use rhyme feel comfortable doing it. So, a rhyme poem is always a tricky thing. I like doing it, but it always means a little bit more work for everybody if it's going to continue to be a rhyme poem. So, if there are problems with like word choice and condensation and wordiness in the line, that makes it different.

But I think, about writing free verse, the first thing I look at is the line length, because I think what happens, I generally encourage a shorter line, people generally go too long. What happens when you write a long line is that it encourages wordiness, encourages, kind of, I hate to use the word laziness, but it's kind of a laziness where you just kind of, you allow idioms into your work or you allow extra words into the work to fill out the line.

So, the first thing I do is I cut the line in half, most of the time, and say, okay, work with this short line. It's a kind of vice on the language. It's like putting pressure on the line. My hands are going like this, it almost feels like a Donald Trump gesture, but you put the pressure on the language by shortening the line. So, I always encourage people, try a short line, then you can lengthen it later, but it squeezes out all the extra words when you go to a shorter line.

And then in terms of where to break a line, well, that's kind of an endless subject, but I also think it's very personal. I don't think every poem comes with a perfect line break or a line length, I think it ends up being your personal choice, as long as you know how you're making that choice, you know? So, there's a lot of things you can do with a line break. I always think in terms of song, I know I have a lot to say about this. I always think, if you think about when you sing, one of the things that happens is you come into the line with a lot of air. And so, that first word has a lot of force on it, and then the last word right before you turn to take your next breath of air often has a lot of force on it. So, just in terms of the way we say a line, that happens. So, you want the beginnings and the ends of your lines to be important and not throw away, since you're going to hit those a little bit harder.

So, I basically take a biological approach to the line. So, that's the first thing and I mean, there's a million things to talk about, you can spread your palms across the page, there's a lot of choices to be made. And again, finally, it's going to be a personal choice, but I'll have advice along the way.

Orna Ross: The poem decides, I guess.

Jon Davis: Yeah, my poems are as diverse as anybody's poems, you know, if you flip through my books, it looks like it was written by a committee because I enjoy all the different kinds of shapes and forms.

How has being a poetry editor fed into your own work?

Orna Ross: And talk to us, before we let you go, just talk to us a little bit about your own poetic development. I mean, you told us very interestingly there about how you started, and I was saying before we came on, in the pre-chat, that I think being a construction worker is a brilliant metaphor for, you know, what a poet should do before they actually turn to constructing poems. But yeah, now you're still writing. You've got a book coming, I know. Tell us a bit about the work that you're doing right now. And has your editing fed into your own work?

Jon Davis: Well, yeah, I mean, because I taught myself, I kind of, I had this thing called strategies for revising poems, and it's just like an endless list of things that I've done myself. I think the advantage I've had as a teacher is, I had to teach myself, and so I didn't have someone there, I didn't have a workshop to tell me what to do. So, I had to create a workshop in my mind and so I've worked for years, creating this list of techniques and stuff, and if I find myself stuck, I can go to that list, and I usually give this to my students too, {inaudible} and I say, try writing past the current end of the poem, try cutting the current end, try cutting the current end and driving past it. So, I have a whole bunch of strategies that I developed because I learned myself.

I forgot, what was the other part of the question?

Orna Ross: I would love to see that list. Would you be willing to share that with our listeners?

Jon Davis: I can do that, yeah.

Orna Ross: That would be fantastic. You can share it with me afterwards and we'll put it into the show notes for the actual show, but I'm sure a lot of them would appreciate that and that will be very useful. Thank you. Yeah. So, I was wondering, working as an editor, has that improved your own poetry, or has it fed into your own poetry in any way? This, kind of, new life you have, I know the editing is kind of a continuation of your teaching vocation, but it's a bit different too. So, I'm just wondering if it has wrought any changes in your own work?

Jon Davis: It's wrought a greater appreciation for the, kind of, range of poetries that are out there, I've had to go and look at everything. I've been to Walmart, which is the big box store out here, and there's poetry in Walmart. And so, I went down the aisle and I've picked them all up and I read to see what, you know, because a lot of my clients are headed in that direction. And so, I needed to know, and I needed to understand, like, what is it that makes this book a best seller, you know? And this one can't get published; you know? So, I have a lot to say about that Rupi Kaur, the best-selling phenomena.

Rupi Kaur Poetry – An Editorial Perspective

Orna Ross: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that because, I mean, it is a self-publisher's dream to be selling in Walmart, let's face it, and Rupi has been so influential in terms of, you know, on Instagram obviously, but also hugely influential in what's selling on Amazon and in other places.

Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on that from an editorial perspective.

Jon Davis: Yeah, well, it would be hard to replicate her success, but what she did, of course, was to start on Instagram, you know, work social media, also to become a personality. I mean, she's, you know, kind of a compelling personality, I've seen her on late night talk shows, she's totally comfortable doing that. So really, it's a package, you know, the work by itself probably wouldn't have gone anywhere near where it went without the whole package. So, I think if you want to go that route, you've got to create yourself, you know, Instagram influencer, you know, and I see a lot of people trying to do it and I don't know quite how you separate yourself from the pack, but I think it can be done, you know, other people are right alongside her.

But the work itself is, I mean, the way that operates is it's very direct poetry, very direct about emotions, very brief, and I think those qualities work, and then she, of course, has the visual element too, which isn't a bad idea. But there's a little magic to it.

Orna Ross: As you say, it's not a replicable, and also, I think there was a timing thing, I think it hit at a certain time.

Live Poetry Feedback – Urban Kiss by Sue Williams

Okay, so just before we leave, Sue Williams has dropped us a poem, can you read that? Can you see the comments?

Jon Davis: I don't see it. Oh, wait here, over in the comments. Okay. Yeah.

Orna Ross: Okay, are you seeing that? It's called Urban Kiss.

Jon Davis: All right. So, first thing I would ask is, where are we going, you know? But I'll would assume, I'll just take it as a poem and see what happens.

Orna Ross: Yeah. Maybe Sue will drop another comment to tell us, you know, what is your poetic intention, Sue, for this poem? Where are you going with this? Because this is the first question that Jon always asks. But, yeah, let's have a look at it just as words for now, and also, I think possibly she wasn't able to do her line breaks because of the limitations of the comments format. But yeah, let's give it a go and see. Okay.

Jon Davis: Can I read it aloud? Do we have time? I don't know.

Orna Ross: Yeah, we have time, we'll make time. Yep.

Jon Davis: Urban Kiss.

Dark and edgy, teetering. I wonder if the capital there means line break, but…

Dark and edgy, teetering on the brink of urban sprawl, the rocky road to our first kiss explodes into vibrant color. Now, tightly held in thrall, silhouetted against the skyline. Backs no longer pressed against the wall, merging deep into blissful eternity, as rainbow colors sublimely radiate and majestically fall.

Okay. So, first of all, I would probably not approach this as a literary poem, but as, you know, a very different kind of poem. Closer to what Rupi Kaur, for lack of or since we've been talking about her, than a literary poem, although the language is really interesting at times in this poem. So, dark and edgy, teetering on the brink of urban sprawl, all seams, at first look, very good. I might play with those words.

The rocky road to our first kiss, rocky road, I would say is kind of a cliche, maybe there's a better way to approach that? I would look at that. Again, just to say a poem should be fresh, no matter what kind of poem you're writing, the language should be as fresh as possible. So, I would look at, the rocky road to our first kiss.

Okay, I guess the capital letters look like the beginnings of lines so, Explodes into vibrant color. So, vibrant color is interesting, but I kind of want to know what colors those are maybe instead, I would push towards the particular there, maybe. And again, this is a quick take instead of general rules.

I love the in thrall in that next line, now tightly held in thrall. There's something interesting about that. I mean, to be in thrall is to be in, kind of, a loss of power, that's really interesting for a kiss.

Silhouetted against the skyline, backs no longer pressed against the wall.

I like the idea in terms of, it's almost like this cinematic image of being silhouetted against the skyline. There's a little problem with the grammar in there, and it probably should be, silhouetted against the skyline, there should be a we there, you know, because it's more than the backs that are silhouetted. So, silhouetted against the skyline, maybe our backs, or we, it probably should be we, probably should give the whole figure.

And then, backs no longer pressed against the wall. So, there's a sense of being freed by this kiss from, you know, backs against the wall is an expression of being up against it, you know, like desperate.

Backs no longer pressed against the wall, merging deep into blissful eternity.

Here's where it gets a little tricky, with blissfully eternity. Again, kind of a generalization, it's okay, but I would always try to push past that. So, when we merge, you know, what really is it like? Is there a physical way, a metaphorical way to talk about that, rather than blissfully eternity? So, I would look at that.

And then, as rainbow colors sublimely radiate and majestically fall. I like majestically fall, again, because it's kind of a Gothic poem, but rainbow colors for me, again, the kind of generalization of that, and so I would ask to push further on that.

So, I like all of it, I would just spotlight certain areas where the language could be a little bit more particular and maybe metaphorical instead of descriptive.

So, that's where I would start. I mean, it would take me awhile to really work the poem over. I'm methodical, and I probably make like $2 an hour most of the time because I have to keep looking at it, but I'm interested in the work.

It feels almost like this could be a graphic novel, you know, a poem with, kind of, an illustration, or within an illustration, which would really interest me.

Orna Ross: Lovely. That's really great. Thank you, Jon, and thank you, Sue, for putting your poem there to be edited like that, brave act. So, I hope you found it useful.

Jon Davis: Look at that. The poem was written about a picture someone painted. All right, get that painting and put it next year to your poem.

Orna Ross: Instagram moment, Sue.

Okay, we are out of time now. I would like to say a big thank you, Jon. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us about editing. Tell people where they can find you if they would like to pursue the editing more formally.

Jon Davis: Right, well, I'm on Bookfox, which is at https://thejohnfox.com/poetry-editor-jon-davis/

And then my own website, that I don't know, is jondavispoet.com, I think.

Orna Ross: Jondavispoet.com, I looked it up and again, we will have all of the website addresses and everything else that you've kindly given to us will be on the show notes for the podcast, which will be out next Friday on the Self-Publishing Advice Center. Selfpublishingadvice.org for what you need to watch out for, for that people.

So, yeah, john, thank you so much. It's your birthday on Wednesday, I know. So, a very happy birthday. You doing something nice?

Jon Davis: I have no plans yet, but it depends on the snow.

Orna Ross: Oh, yeah. Okay. Well you can write a poem if nothing else.

Jon Davis: It's been a pleasure. Yeah, it could be kind of fun to come on and just do one where people post poems, and we'd talk about them.

Orna Ross: Why don't we do that? Why don't we get you back? We have our topics all worked out for the next few months but say early in the new year might be nice to do that. Let's say that we will do that.

Jon Davis: I said that it's an impossible thing to do, but that it was kind of fun.

Orna Ross:  No, it's fun, and I think the spontaneity of it is actually…it's usually very useful. I know you go back and there are second thoughts and more with editing, but always that first flush, I think, is very interesting and useful, I hope.

Jon Davis: Yeah, I'll send the strategies for revising poems too.

Orna Ross: That's fantastic. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you again.

Jon Davis: All right. Great, thank you.

Orna Ross: Thank you to everyone. Happy writing and happy publishing. We'll see you again next week. Bye-bye.