You have a poem that has some interesting ideas or rhythms, but it’s just not making it? Here are some things I do when I revise a poem to work:
Take some of your lines, split them down the middle, and regroup them e.g.:
Here are the shelves of unread books
An immigrant who stands on the edge of the forest
becomes: Here are the shelves on the edge of the forest
An immigrant who stands on unread books.
Or try to take a poem and erase words, e.g.
In first grade
We learned the names of dandelions and birch trees?
Forgot them & relearned them.
They didn’t make much sense to us,
because we were in New York City
where there weren’t many flowers or trees.
becomes:
Trilliums, sweetgum trees,
forgetting, relearning.
No sense,
New York City,
No flowers or trees.
Try rewriting your poem from a different viewpoint:
Two brothers planted a sequoia in the orchard one afternoon
becomes: All afternoon my brother and I worked in the orchard planting a sequoia.
When I wrote my new book, Touch My Head Softly, I went through many revises:
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/touch-my-head-softly-by-eileen-kennedy
What do you do to revise?
I will be posting on Thursdays, and on Tuesdays, if I have an announcement.
My new poetry collection can be viewed here:
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/touch-my-head-softly-by-eileen-kennedy/
Here is the link to my book on Goodreads:
Eileen P. Kennedy Author 
As it turns out, I love revising. Mostly prose but sometimes poetry (especially if I have some distance from it). I look for incidental words that don’t add to the story/poem but just take up space, and I remove them. Then I do the same again and again until I’ve whittled whatever doesn’t shrink the story’s integrity, plot- and character-wise.
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