Budding poets can learn from Ted Witham's experiences. He encourages poets to re-write a poem until its form expresses its ideas.

For the writer, submitting by email is fast and satisfying. However, rejection can be equally fast and brutal.
Three weeks ago, I sent off a poem to an editor I’ve respected for over 25 years, Paul Grover at Studio. Within two hours, there’s a rejection.  Paul says “unfortunately he cannot include it in a forthcoming Studio.” However, he goes on, “The poem has real strengths, and it would be valuable to look again at its messages and images.”
My ego smarts for 24 hours. I repeat obsessively in my head the words of Paul’s email, until it dawns on me that Paul has written similar words before.  On that occasion, I picked my ego up and re-drafted the poem. Paul accepted it.
So now, I think, I should look back at what I had so rapidly submitted. I am defensive as I read the piece: What is wrong with it? Why isn’t it acceptable? The words of the piece evoke visceral power. The themes, grieving and death, have pre-occupied poets from Donne’s triumphant shout, “Death, be not proud!” to Dylan Thomas’ protest, “Do not go gently into that good night.”
For some reason, this breathtaking reflection on fundamental questions has made little impact on Paul. But it has made some: the strengths he identifies are its”messages and images”. I suddenly remember reading about writers submitting for publication: “valuable to look again” is editor-speak for the near-opposite of rejection. It’s encouragement to fix it up.
 But how to improve it? You can’t simply write back to the editor, even Paul who I feel I know, and ask him to tell me how to make it better. He’s the gate-keeper, not the path-maker.
It dawns on me that what I need to ask again is, ‘What is a poem?’ I tuck this question into my sub-conscious to tease out over the next few days. Of course, I know what a poem is. Didn’t I study English at University? Haven’t I read, not just my favourite Hopkins, but Milton, Baudelaire in the original French, and Gwen Harwood, and Robert Frost, and every poem in 27 years of Studio?
But I quickly cut myself down to size. I may have read all those poems. In 45 years I may have written and published scores of poems. But I still can’t say what makes a poem, and what by contrast is just a collection of words.
I realise to my shame that I submitted to Paul a transcription of a dream cut into short lines to make it look like a poem. The piece lacked craft. Not every poem has to conform to conventional forms. Thousands of poems aren’t sonnets. But a real poem must have a shape, sufficient crafted structure to take the reader from one place to another.
True: some poems come out right at first writing. But these have been designed already in the brain, consciously or subconsciously. A poem first has to have this element of crafted shape.
Secondly, every poem must say something. I don’t like message poetry, where the poet wants to persuade me of his agenda. But poetry is expression. It must express something. The poet must be able to enunciate for herself a focused theme.
With these two in mind, shape and expression, I look again at my transcribed dream. What I want is to express is my grief over those adolescents who were in my care as chaplain and who committed suicide then or later. That’s what I want to say.
The dream included a surreal funeral. Telling the story of that funeral service now guides the poem’s shape. I can make the story swing between a realistic funeral and a mass funeral of many young men, “car-crashed, chemical-smashed, rafter-hung // beautiful boys”.
I re-write it twice, three times, ten times. It now has three stanzas of four lines each: they arise during the re-writing process. It has no rhymes, just shattered assonances: “My ego too, fed by the dead; my responsibility still.”
I don’t know whether it is good enough to submit again. I put it away to review in a few weeks. Then I might make more changes, more blows with the sculpting chisel.
If I am satisfied, I will then send the new piece to Paul with an apology: I am sorry I sent you the report of a dream. Whether fit for publication or not, this now might qualify as a poem.