Good enough? Settling for a draft when we should keep pushing (12.19.20)

Have you ever experienced this?  

You write a quick draft of a poem, maybe at a single sitting, and applaud yourself for the effort.  Your poem is ready to share.  One draft and it's a winner . . . Let's get it published!

But before too long--maybe you're waiting to fall off to sleep later that same day--it starts to nag you.  I could have expressed that image at little more tautly.  I might have over-written that narrative passage.  The closing could be, just maybe, a bit "graspy."  Hmmmm . . . that was a weak verb choice in the fifth line . . .

Lying there in the dark, you think maybe you declared victory and walked away from the hard work too soon.  Maybe you settled for a draft that looks GOOD ENOUGH.  

But if you go back to drafting, maybe you'll kill the idea right out of the poem.  Maybe you'll make a mess out of what seemed good enough in the first place.

Or maybe you'll see that the poem you drafted is just a vague imitation of itself, or of the original impulse you had when you started making language and lines.  Nobody wants to admit that!

What do you do when you're certainty begins to slip about the poem you've written?  Your response to this problem is what separates the artist from the sheep, to mix a metaphor.  The sheep hopes nobody else will notice.  The artist gets back to work.

Of course, this all supposes that you have that capacity to see your own work objectively in the first place.  If you don't, then acquire it.  How?  Workshops can help because they are (usually) designed to provide objective points of view of your work.  That is, so long as they aren't too programmatic, ideological, or otherwise bent to some single perspective, agenda or belief about poetry.  A trusted reader of your work--your personal editor, so to speak--is another way to garner external points of view of your work.  But in this case, "trusted" must mean somebody who has the interest, the analytical capability, and the ruthlessness to critique your work that you should be looking for.  "Trusted" means that you trust this reader to give an honest assessment.  

Still another way to become a more objective observer of your own work is to read.  And read widely.  Read poems that are outside your comfort zone, that you may not even enjoy reading.  Make a study of every poem you read.  How did this poem come to be?  How did the writer get from line 1 to line x?  What other options might this writer have chosen for that expression or this image?  What is this poem doing to me as I read it?

Finally, ask what your own relationship to your poem (to your writing) might be.  Are you making art or are you making nice?  Well?