Polishing is the late-stage work of making a poem’s existing design clean, responsive, and sonically exact. The poet listens for awkward stresses, unnecessary echoes, weak verbs, accidental vagueness, and transitions that snag the reading. Unlike rebuilding, polishing does not necessarily alter the architecture; it brings the surfaces into alignment with the poem’s intention. Too much polish can erase productive roughness, so the finest revision preserves grain, surprise, and human irregularity.

Polishing is the final or near-final attention given to diction, punctuation, rhythm, line breaks, and transitions. It can remove awkwardness and sharpen an image, but it should not erase productive strangeness or the poem’s individual voice. Read both silently and aloud, checking whether each revision improves the whole rather than a single line.