Apparently American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, took 17 drafts too write a sonnet. Don't quote me on this, or ask me which one (does she even have more than one sonnet?) – I haven't actually backed up this stat or fact with research cos I was feeling lazy. Which is kind of ironic really because the lesson here is, if you want to be a great poet, you need to work hard at your craft. Write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.
And I think that's my biggest hurdle to overcome at the moment. I'm currently writing a certain standard of poetry and hoping it will get magically better. I write a poem, tinker with it a little until I get a feeling of satisfaction and then I stop because I think that feeling means my poem is done.
However, what I need to do is get to that feeling of satisfaction and then push myself through it to the other side. Because what that little feeling is telling me is that I have just written a poem to the standard of Indrani Perera but what I want to be doing is writing a poem to the standard of Elizabeth Bishop. I realise I may never be that good, but that's not the point. The point is to keep striving and improving my craft.
So now I'm not going to stop when I sense that little feeling of satisfaction, I'm going to keep going until I feel the poem is better than I thought it could be.