Is it better to write just a few poems that are as well-crafted as one can possibly achieve, or to use poetry to make a great many poems, spilling them out as they come?

Does it have to be a choice? Okay, if so, what I would love to do ideally is the first choice: "write just a few poems that are as well-crafted as one can possibly achieve," but what I often end up doing is something in between the two choices of that and "using poetry to make a great many poems, spilling them out as they come." I write and put poems out for feedback to improve my writing, as I am new to writing poetry. If I were to wait and craft a poem as well as it can be crafted first (what is that point, I wonder?) I would miss out on this and this is essential to me right now. I do write, then edit, write, edit, think, read, feel, write, erase, trash, write, edit, think, feel, read, edit, write, trash, write.. ad nauseum. I wait until there is a moment when I "feel" the poem is ready to go out for feedback. The poem has to speak to me very personally and evoke the initial feeling in me upon reading it the 500th time that I felt when I was inspired to write in the first place. That's kind of the litmus test it must pass. Even then it often isn't "finished." Is anything ever finished? Maybe other poets write poems and they are DONE. No one, not even the poet at that point is allowed to mess with them anymore. But I don't think of mine that way, at least not yet...perhaps because I am still so new and learning and see them all as works in progress, perhaps until I die they will be still be able to be worked more. I have a long list of poems I tweak almost daily. Changing a word here, removing a comma there. Edit, edit, edit. Always editing. Or trashing stuff when I can't seem to move something from a feeling point to expression. There isn't a poem I have written that isn't open to be improved upon...not one, and that's the truth. I'm guessing that will always be the case, and I'm okay with that. If I send poems out to the feedback loop or to someone for feedback (like you, ) they tend to be in very fetal form...not tweaked or crafted very much. That way, I am not very attached to anything in them, other than the initial feeling or idea that inspired the poem. I find I am open to feedback and suggestions I notice much more than if I have spent months crafting something and then have to put down my notions of what I love about the poem to "hear" what someone is saying to me about it. That might just be me, but I don't want to be defensive about feedback. The less attached I am, the better able I am to hear feedback, if that makes any sense. Thank you so much for the A2A!

I have appreciated all of these fine and thoughtful answers to my question, which is one that I brood about. As several have noted, there is something of a false opposition here--Robert Graves' poem "The White Goddess" will live forever, and the other several hundred poems he wrote and published probably will not, and in a sense he illustrates that both sides of the equation wind up being one thing in the end. Randall Jarrell said that a poet is someone who stands in a lightning storm all their life, and if they are struck by lightning just a few times, they are a good poet--ten or twelve times and they are great. Someone else, and I wish I could remember who, advised young poets to write much and publish little, which is what many of these answers basically say.   For me, the compulsion to write has always been extremely powerful--at this point I have produced thousands of pages of work. And very little of it still exists or will ever see the light of day. Which is crazy, in a way, since in the end I'd rather have something like Allan Ginsburg's Collected Poems as a legacy, ragged and sprawling as it is, but the record of the life lived, then something like John Crowe Ransom's Selected Poems, which is only about sixty pages long (he lived to be 90), and while each poem in it is very fine, they don't move me, finally, the way that the example of Ginsburg's life in the art does. But that's just me....

This is difficult because you don't want to err too far in either direction. Obsess too much about your work and never finish it, and no one but the most die-hard of hipsters will know who you are. You won't have created anything in the end. On the other hand if you just write down every little thought that comes into your brain without filtering or crafting, you are going to produce crap - and get known for that. Ideally, you want a happy medium. Work hard on your poetry, write it well, give it structure, choose the right words... but know when to let it be and release it to the public eye. Know when to move on to the next piece, the next inspiration. That's of course not an answer. If I had to choose, if I were the poetess myself, I guess I'd rather be known for brilliance than simply being a prolific, terrible writer.

There's a balance between these two strategies. I advise a poet who is starting out to write many poems and focus on making each better than the last, rather than polishing a few poems in an effort to perfect them. And there are later phases when the "flow" is in full flow, and you just keep writing. Inbetween there are times when you go over earlier work and refine it. I've found that putting new poems aside and coming back to them a few months to a year later is very useful in gaining perspective on what's working. As poets we love language, and there's a risk that we love our own newborn poems too much to make the tough decisions that are necessary. By the time they are a year old we are over our infatuation, and can perform surgery as needed. Poetry is a "spare" medium. In general, everything nonessential needs to go, and that's hard to see sometimes.