Am following a course in poetry online with http://creativewriting.ie/ and this is one of the exercises.
Apart from the "how to" aspect... the challenge is to rejig a poem you have already written
so you may have read an earlier incarnation of this one in a previous post.
How to gut
a fish or edit a poem
First you
have to lay the subject flat
and cut off
head and tail.
No mercy
for extraneous indigestible
matter. Make
puncture wound at anus, cutting
through
paired pelvic fins, slicing
the thin
abdominal wall, incising
the ventral
surface along the horizontal
until you
reach jaw.
Let spill
the guts and blood and slime -
A delicate
flick of knife at dorsal fin
turn the
spine of your knife against
the grain
of the scales, and flay
until you shed silver.
Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016
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