Editing poetry requires a whole different toolkit and often a subtler, more generative and expansive approach than when editing other genres.
While it may seem like there are fewer rules and conventions when it comes to poetry, or that poems’ inner workings are too mysterious to confidently edit, the fact remains that there are good poems and bad poems. Some poetry collections win awards while many other manuscripts never get published. How can we as editors help poets write their best poems and find their audience?
A poem is an emotion-mediating technology. It is an object with strange and important work to do, but it is an object nonetheless, one with a physical body, whose body can be more or less successful at communicating emotional information. We’ll look to the visual arts to apply aesthetic principles to honour and draw out our clients’ intentions for their poetic work. We’ll also look at ways to help poets get published by determining their place within their contemporaries’ milieu, for a more robust engagement with the CanLit poetry community.
The business side of editing poetry can differ greatly from editing prose, so you’ll learn about how to implement this into your freelance practice.
In the webinar, we’ll discuss how to earn authority as a poetry editor, how to edit poetry using the elements and principles of design, how to choose supplementary resources for our clients, and how to price poetry edits.
Presenter
Margo LaPierre is a freelance literary editor and a writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She has won national awards for her writing and editing. She has served on Arc Poetry Magazine’s executive and editorial boards since 2019 and is a member of the poetry collective VII. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and a graduate certificate in publishing from Toronto Metropolitan University. She lives as a settler on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land, colonially known as Ottawa. Her second full-length poetry collection, Ajar, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in October 2025.