Critiquing Your Own and Others PoemsAfter the initial pouring out that becomes a poem in some condition, most poems will greatly benefit from revision. Revision, re-vision, re-seeing, requires a coming-back-around to the poem time after time to reconsider various aspects of it (see "Romancing the Stone" section) in order to maximize the impact of the poem on its readers. There are particular things you can consider.
Not all of these issues are relevant for every poem. Not all poems must MEAN anything. Poetry does not need to be written in sentences, for example. And I consider e.e. cummings the king of punctuation because of how he used language graphically on the page. He punctuated with words and spacing and word relationships.
1