I guess I am going to find a way to edit. I mean winnowing. I think looking honestly at your own work is hard. This is where the “kill your darlings” part comes in – what is your favorite, for whatever reasons, may not apply to others.
In quilting, this means that a special play between two colors in one part of a quilt just isn’t enough to make it special for the person who hasn’t seized on those few square inches as you did. Can you make the whole thing work for them?
In writing, it’s knowing that the reader doesn’t know there are three more companion haiku that go with this one. They don’t know the back story; they only have the words before them to go on. They need to be able to read it in their own voice and get a reaction, right?
(Or I guess if you’re in the Modern Poetry course you tease the words apart and roll each word around individually until you are thinking about something you made up in your own head instead of the group of words that the poet put down on paper… oops – tangent alert!)
