Most of the methods I use to revise a poem start with reading the poem in such ways that I distance myself from it-I try to place myself in the reader's place, and I try to push back what I already know about the poem. The best technique I have found -- to stop reading the poem for a week or month or so -- is also the hardest to implement. Sometimes I am able to ignore the poem for a few days, but parts of it stay in my brain, teasing me, till I have to return to the paper. The next-best distancing method is to read it out loud. I suppose that a similarly good method (which I have never tried) might be to read the poem into a tape recorder and play it back. When I manage to fool myself into reading the poem from a fresh perspective, I find other glitches: the timing, scansion, mood, and meaning of a poem can shift from the writer's plans to the reader's perspective, and if I find these glitches, I rewrite and go back to "distance reading" again. Of course the very best way to distance myself from something I've written is to give it to someone else to read, but that's for later. 

Usually most of my final "touch-up" revising is done after I am happy with the poem's content; the form and most of the lines will probably remain unchanged. I am just trying to make sure it reads well, and that it can have meaning to an uninformed reader. I call this final stage of my revising "tweaking". To this end, I run the poem through several related analytic tests, and make adjustments as necessary. The tests are performed to make sure that the poem has a level of prosaicism, and is using lines, stanzas, and punctuation to pause correctly and change tempo. Usually at this stage (and sometimes previous revisions) I cannot immediately decide which revision is best, so I keep all the versions of the poem and eventually choose one version to present to my readers. 

"Prosaicism", or the "prose-ness" of a poem - how well it translates into prose - can be determined by using my prosaic test: I collapse all of the lines together, creating a paragraph, then read it out loud as prose. As an example I will use the opening stanzas from Muse:, which was originally written in quatrains. Here are some lines passing the prosaic test (to my satisfaction, at least):
 

And here are the same words before the test:
 

In addition to consolidating the verse to look for prosaicism, I also break lines, rearrange stanzas, and add and remove punctuation, to look for more effective (or more reasonable) breaks and pauses in the poem. For example, I couldn't leave Muse: in neat quatrains. I wanted to slow it down a lot, and break it into new stanzas to give the mood time to change from one setting to the next (notice how some of the punctuation could be left out, too):
 

I ended up separating lines even further in my final versions of the poem, and stripped more punctuation and all capitalization. This left the poem more closely approximating what I was trying to convey -- stark interludes of imagery, where the subject is shown contemplating feelings of personal identity and the interdependence of nature (a theme which rears its head in several other poems of mine).

Sometimes my lines will be broken apart and put together in several different ways before I decide to leave them the way they were in the first place. Sometimes the original is more broken than the final version. An example is Inspiration X, the opening lines of which originally looked like this:
 

Notice that in its final form it is much more compact, which allows the narrative to flow.

After I have decided to let a poem go public, I print out copies and force them on my friends and relatives. I try to pick as the first readers those who read poetry regularly, and are willing to eagerly critique all levels of the poem-technical, ideational, and emotional. English graduates are the best critics, I find, because they have generally perused lots of poetry and are able to analyze it well. Since four of my siblings and my father are English grads I have no shortage of critics. 

In addition I give the poems to friends who don't read much poetry, because I often get additional relevant feedback of a kind I might not receive from experts. I listen carefully to all the critiques, and when readers say cryptic things like, "Hmm, that's interesting," I try to draw more out; I try to get them to discuss what they really thought and what their interpretation of the meaning was. 

Sometimes if I hear a mention of a problem with a poem and I agree with the critique, I will revise the poem again. I try to not become too attached to certain versions, and I also try to keep favorite lines from interfering with the integrity of the poem --"No line is sacred," I tell myself, and sometimes I listen, too. In this way I am preparing for future submissions to magazines; if I am more ready to revise, my poetry is that more likely to be published.