Rebecca Hazelton's excellent essay on the many ways poetic lines can function introduced me to an exercise by Catherine Wagner, which I share here:  "Dive into this exercise, called “Six S’s,” from Catherine Wagner in Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook. It’s just as useful to a solitary writer as it is in the classroom—all it requires is taking a poem out of its lineated form and writing it out in prose."

Reading poems on the radio for the first time really intimidated me, but it was a wonderful learning experience. You always have to slow down when reading a poem, but there's something about the absence of visual communication that really forces you to think about what the words are doing on the page. To that end, make a voice memo of yourself reading your poem aloud. Then, of course, you have to listen to that recording. Where do you cringe? Where does an image fall flat? An intended meaning get lost in obscurity? Return to the page, so much the wiser. 

This exercise is especially helpful if your poem is feeling overwrought/too logical/somewhat stuffy: "try rewriting it in reverse order... last line first, next-to-last line second, and so on, ending with the opening line." This exercise upsets the chronological and grammatical order of things, and will help you to make "surprising new connections between ideas and images" (156).

Adapted from Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, by Amorak Huey & W. Todd Kaneko

Take a cue from poet and translator Todd Fredson: Run a poem that is giving you a hard time through Google Translator (or another translating app). Translate it into Spanish, or Japanese, or another language (it would probably be even more helpful if you are somewhat familiar with the language) and then back again into English. What surprises you with in this translation? Pay attention to even the smallest of details: what pronouns were replaced? Articles? Spacial descriptions? 

Look back at a poem you've written and felt really good about lately. Re-read it with a bend toward the philosophical, and then articulate why you think this poem accomplishes what you want your poetry to do. Write that as an ars poetica. 

A

Place a 3 x 3 box on your poem, and cut it (with scissors or a word processor, depending on how crafty you're feeling). Use it as a poem in and of itself, with a new title, or move it around in the document to see how it changes your understanding of the poem.

B

Alternatively, consider the artist-- you-- from a different angle. Take a mental selfie of the looker, and include that description somewhere in your poem. Or draw the looker into the background of a scene or image in the poem. Try to dramatize the distance between the seer and the seen (Las Meninas /  Velazquez style). 

I love what the poet Dexter Booth says about repetition in this interview for the LA Review of Books:

"Repetition offers transition but also an opportunity for recontextualization. Resetting. Meditation. Pondering. Each time a line or title is repeated, it hits differently. I think of the lines of some poems like elements in a still-life painting. They can be observed from various angles and still be the same objects, but each vantage point brings something unique into focus, highlighting an element that may not get as much attention if the perspective is shifted....Sometimes the speaker of my poems repeats things because they want to believe repeating can make reality, repeating can will a thing into existence. Sometimes, it’s an attempt to embody a moment or belief, like when you put your new favorite song on repeat to learn and memorize the lyrics. I hope readers experience this as they read the book, particularly if they read it aloud.

To push a working manuscript further  (to untangle some of the poetic threads that already exist within you and within your work), take a stab at writing a poem in the Glosa form-- only, instead of quoting another poet's work, quote yourself. The Glosa is a medieval Spanish form that Kamiko Hahn writes about beautifully here for the Poetry Foundation. The basic building blocks include beginning a poem with a stanza from another poem (in this case, yours), and building stanzas that engage each line from that stanza both directly (in repetition) and indirectly (in echo, rhyme). Stick with the form no matter how unwieldy it feels for the first few drafts, then see what comes of it. It may be multiple poems, or a grotesque statue you can whittle down further. Speaking of statues...