writing poetry

[Veva]

Hi, I was told by my friend that if you can write poetry then you just can and you don't need to educate yourself further in "creative writing", but I feel that I need some sort of supervision, if there is any literature you could recommend me to become a better writer of poetry, please feel free to post it here...thanx

[blp]

One of the best tips I ever read was to avoid abstraction. The actual advice went, go through your work and highlight the abstract stuff in pink and the concrete stuff - imagery and so on - in yellow. Is there too much pink? See what you can take out and replace with imagery, e.g. not, 'I felt sad', but, for instance, 'Everything turned grey' or 'I was a bug on its back who couldn't even be bothered to kick anymore.' And is there too much yellow? There's no such thing as too much yellow.

[NickAdams]

If poetry was innate then I would agree, but even eating is something learned. I believe poetry to be a cultural development and we are inclined to write poetry because of the enjoyment we have in reading it ... for the most part. The life of poetry is language, but you don't have to delve into a dictionary or grammar book, because poetry doesn't require that. What is important, at least to me, is learning the language of poetry itself: imagery, metaphor, symbolism etc.
some of this is so familiar to us that it seems natural, but it's learned. Knowing the physics of poetry will give you control of the medium. I would recommend The Poet's Dictionary: http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dictionary-Handbook-Prosody-Devices/dp/0062720457/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230754297&sr=1-1

It will also help you understand technical aspects of the poems you like.

[quasimodo1]

ab⋅strac⋅tion   /æbˈstrækʃən/ [ab-strak-shuhn]

–noun 1. an abstract or general idea or term.
2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.
3. an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.
4. the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal: The sensation of cold is due to the abstraction of heat from our bodies.
5. secret removal, esp. theft.
6. absent-mindedness; inattention; mental absorption.
7. Fine Arts. a. the abstract qualities or characteristics of a work of art.
b. a work of art, esp. a nonrepresentational one, stressing formal relationships.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origin:
1540–50; < LL abstractiōn- (s. of abstractiō) separation. See abstract, -ion {Avoiding abstraction as a general rule might be good for those just initiating themselves into poetry but there is the limitation...abstraction infiltrates poetry... contemporary and classic... on a massive scale}

[PrinceMyshkin]

Read. Read like crazy. Read the poems here. Go to a bookstore and browse among the anthology of poems until one grabs your eye, then read. Don't labour to understand what you read. Poetry doesn't always or often translate rationally. Find things that please you for any old reason and read some more. Without planning it, you will be picking up the things you need to know - not to imitate them, though that can be helpful as a starter, but to allow them to provoke echoes in your own mind.

[blp]

ab⋅strac⋅tion   /æbˈstrækʃən/ [ab-strak-shuhn]
{Avoiding abstraction as a general rule might be good for those just initiating themselves into poetry but there is the limitation...abstraction infiltrates poetry... contemporary and classic... on a massive scale}

I agree, but I think the principle is good for starting poets because it shows them how to begin to be creative, specific and thoughtful about what they want to say.

[Veva]

Thank you all for your suggestions, I will definitely try out all your recommendations. What I would also like to know is what do you people write about and how? I mean if something worth writing about happens to you, do you grab the pen immediately, or you keep it in mind and work on it gradually? And is your poetry mostly personal (I mean about emotios)?

[blp]

Mine's pretty much all about emotions and pretty much all personal. I usually don't write about things immediately. Do you know the old dictum that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility? Can't remember who said it.

I guess a lot of poets write poems straight off, start at the beginning and write poetically through to the end, but there are other ways. I never really set out to write poetry, I was initially just taking notes - often taking them to figure out what I was interested in, to find subjects as much as develop them. Sometimes I found that I could then go through my notes, discard the crap and have something that looked like a poem. I'd recommend this fairly quick, freeform scribbling, not just for the surprising literary results it can give you, but also for the psychological effect, which seems to me inseparable. Stuff comes up you couldn't have expected, structure seems to appear unbidden and, rather as in dream analysis, problems begin to feel like they're being worked out without you quite knowing how.

[PrinceMyshkin]

First, I want to endorse the excellent suggestions made just before this by blp. To that I would add this: allow your subconscious to offer up a phrase. It needn't be a complete sentence, just some seemingly random words about your thinking or feeling at the moment. Trust those words. Attend to whatever rhythm or assertion they make and then follow to what seems to come up next. Stop when you seem to have run out of steam, then read over what you've written. Look for what seems extraneous or redundant... cut and if necessary add.

[blp]

I'll gladly return the compliment by fully endorsing what Prince says and I'll expand just a little further again. If your unconscious doesn't seem willing to offer up a phrase, you may find it suprisingly responsive to warming-up exercises: word association and mind maps work well. If you're not sure what a mind map is, google it. The way I do them is to write something in the middle of the page I might want to investigate or think about ('otherness', 'hunger', 'longing', 'Louise' etc.), draw a circle around it, then write my associations with it around it, draw circles around them and extend outward with further associations, some of which may also be linked.

You can also spruce up your skills and further nudge the unconscious by playing around with some of the poetic forms in the poetry games and contests section. Simple, but clearly defined forms such as haiku and clerihew, will often force surprising results from you and give you a kind of playground in which to build your skills and confidence. I'm biased because I started it, but I'd also recommend just letting rip in the write a really bad poem thread. Over and over again in that thread, people discover just how difficult it is to be really bad - a confidence builder if ever there was one.

Without wishing to overwhelm you, you could also look into some of the generative processes used by groups such as the surrealists and the Oulipo. Not nearly as daunting as that might sound. A lot of these are very simple games, for instance a game in which two people write questions and answers without knowing what the other is doing, for instance these by Suzanne Muzard and Andre Breton:

What is a kiss?
A divagation, everything capsizes.

What is daylight?
A naked woman bathing at nightfall.

What is a bed?
A fan quickly opened. The sound of a bird's wing.

You might not want this sort of thing to be your actual work (I have no interest in being a surrealist at all), but it's another good way of oiling the gears.

[blp]

I don't know how to make poems. I don't consider myself a poet and I don't particularly locate poetry in poems, nor am I the first to say it. Poetry -- as transport, invention or music -- is always an imponderable that can be found in any genre, a sudden widening of the World....a gift of nature, a grace, not a piece of labor. The very ambition to make a poem is enough to kill it.

-- Henri Michaux

[TheFifthElement]

I don't know how to make poems. I don't consider myself a poet and I don't particularly locate poetry in poems, nor am I the first to say it. Poetry -- as transport, invention or music -- is always an imponderable that can be found in any genre, a sudden widening of the World....a gift of nature, a grace, not a piece of labor. The very ambition to make a poem is enough to kill it.

-- Henri Michaux

That's an ace quote.

[PrinceMyshkin]

What is a kiss?
A divagation, everything capsizes.

What is daylight?
A naked woman bathing at nightfall.

What is a bed?
A fan quickly opened. The sound of a bird's wing.


What is an answer?
A question that has yet to be asked.

[blp]

That's an ace quote.

I know. Signature worthy really, except I don't fancy having such a long signature. Both that and the surrealist question game poems are courtesy of Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (volume 1 of 2).



What is an answer?
A question that has yet to be asked.


Hey that's cheating! ;)

[PrinceMyshkin]

we create an anthology for Veva by posting one or more poems that she might benefit from? To begin, here are a couple of favourites of mine:



Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
If I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt around my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely...”

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

Wm Carlos Williams



All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions.

Robert Hass, excerpt from "Privilege of Being," from Human Wishes

[blp]

A quote from Yeats that seems pertinent:

We sat together at summer's end,
That beautiful, mild woman, your close friend,
and you and I and talked of poetry.
You said, a line may take us hours,
But if it does not seem a moment's thought
Then all our stitching and unstitching
Has been for naught.

[Veva]

we create an anthology for Veva by posting one or more poems that she might benefit from?
[/INDENT][/B]

great idea....that would really help me.... please feel free

[blp]

Also, you asked for literature that would help. It's not specifically about poetry and, in fact, may seem rather unpoetic, but for any starting writer who doesn't already know it, I'd strongly recommend Strunk and White's little classic The Elements of Style.

[blp]

'I want to learn, to teach myself, to teach everyone that we must turn back against the enemy that weapon with which he attacks us: LANGUAGE.'

- Jean Luc Godard

[blp]

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

- Frank O'Hara

[PrinceMyshkin]

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.



Jas. Wright

[blp]

Funny, I was thinking about the only actual book on poetry I've ever read, Joseph Conte's Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. It's written very clearly and I really loved it, more than I could have imagined, but still, I thought it might be a little abstruse to recommend here. As it happened, when I searched for that O'Hara poem, the page I found seemed actually to have been put up by Conte as it had a link to his homepage. Well well.

[PrinceMyshkin]

A quote from Yeats that seems pertinent:

We sat together at summer's end,
That beautiful, mild lady, your close friend,
and you and I and talked of poetry.
You said, a line may take us hours,
But if it does not seem a moment's thought
Then all our stitching and unstitching
Has been for naught.

How freaking lovely! It seems from this that I might benefit from this thread along with Veva!

[PrinceMyshkin]

Funny, I was thinking about the only actual book on poetry I've ever read, Joseph Conte's Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. It's written very clearly and I really loved it, more than I could have imagined, but still, I thought it might be a little abstruse to recommend here. As it happened, when I searched for that O'Hara poem, the page I found seemed actually to have been put up by Conte as it had a link to his homepage. Well well.

I haven’t read the Conte book nor any other “how to” book (if I can say that without meaning to sneer at it) on the writing of poetry so it is from candid ignorance that I speak of my deep antipathy to such things. For me the act of writing poetry is the very revolutionary one of trying to find or forge one’s own voice, for which one needs to get in touch with one’s least indoctrinated self. To have someone guide me towards that would be, I think, like reading a manual on how to be my unique self.

[blp]

I haven’t read the Conte book nor any other “how to” book (if I can say that without meaning to sneer at it) on the writing of poetry so it is from candid ignorance that I speak of my deep antipathy to such things. For me the act of writing poetry is the very revolutionary one of trying to find or forge one’s own voice, for which one needs to get in touch with one’s least indoctrinated self. To have someone guide me towards that would be, I think, like reading a manual on how to be my unique self.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not a how to book, it's a book of lit crit focusing on US poets who, in one way or another, follow in the traditions of Williams, Stevens and Pound: Objectivists (Zukovsky, Neidecker, Oppen), Black Mountain, New York School and the Language Poets and it's lovely in a way that I find hard to explain, very clearly and lucidly written without theory jargon and full of superb examples of the work itself, usually reprinted complete.

That said, I understand your skepticism about how-to books, but aren't we ourselves sort of trying to put together a set of guidelines here in discussing ways of approaching poetry? I've been gradually discarding my skepticism about this kind of thing over the years. Your skepticism echoes that of the friend Veva referred to at the start of this thread and I've been meaning to talk about that friend's view, so I will.

I can understand it. Any poetic ability can feel like a rather fragile gift. The Michaux quote again: 'The very ambition to make a poem is enough to kill it'. If you've already got the ability, if it's happening, why screw things up by trying to improve or 'learn your craft' or some such? Especially if, as Michaux says, it's not an act of labor.

But the ability any human has already comes out of something learned - grammar, spelling, punctuation and an almost implausibly vast vocabulary. If you or your betters had taken the attitude when you were a child that you should remain pure and untutored so as not to lose your childish spontaneity, you wouldn't be able to write a damn thing today. Learning those things gave you freedom of expression; they didn't restrict you. (Here in England, there does seem to have been an idea during the hippyish seventies that learning grammar formally was somehow oppressive and it's created a generation of otherwise intelligent people who don't know what nouns and verbs are and, struggling to find the right preposition, often end up just guessing. 'That's disrespectful on me.' they'll say. The point is not that they have a different and equally valid way of saying the thing they want to say, but that they don't really have a way at all. You can hear the discomfort and uncertainty in their voices.)

I went to art school, where, sadly, I learned almost nothing, but one thing that I was forced to get over early on was a tendency to fuss over the details. Almost everyone showed up wanting to draw and paint by sort of getting one bit right, then moving on. In life drawing classes, we were forced to do fast fast drawings: five minutes, one minute, half a minute. It felt very wrong at first and it annoyed us, but very quickly we came to see that we were better off being able to create a generalised whole, fill the page, then carve into it and that we could produce far better results than before, much closer to what we wanted all along.

I think the key thing is, there probably are how-to books that are bad and limiting, but a good one would expand one's possibilities and thereby give one greater freedom, not less. I learned about mind maps and other methods of accessing the unconscious from advertising people. They have to have quick ways of generating ideas and phrases or they don't have jobs. I remember watching this guy do a mindmap with 'toothpaste' in the middle and thinking how much better it would be to put 'otherness' in. I was doing this with a friend from art school days and we both really couldn't believe our tutors hadn't taught us stuff like this. Learning bugger-all at art school hadn't left us freer it had left us paralysed. My friend's an art teacher now and uses this stuff with his students all the time.

More recently, I've been writing a film script and it got to the point where it was almost painful to try to work on it, the thing seemed to make so little sense and have so many stupid holes in the plot. Eventually, swallowing gargantuan amounts of pride, I went and bought Robert McKee's screenwriting manual Story and very quickly realised I'd been writing with one hand tied behind my back. Effectively, I was making the old mistake I'd learned to avoid in drawing all over again, trying to get each detail right before moving on, all without any clear overall sense of the landscape I was moving around in or where I was going. Following McKee's prescription, I shelved dialogue writing and wrote about fifty pages of notes in which I answered every single one of my questions about what, who, where and when I was writing about. When I went back to scenes and dialogue, I didn't even have to refer to these, but I knew what I was doing and was able to plough through with a fluency and ease that actually made it easier to add unconventional creative touches. McKee's a good example because he's frequently caricatured as a prescriber of formulae for commercial success, turning scriptwriting into a deadening sort of form-filling exercise: three act structure, reversal here, twist here, denouement here etc. If this was in the book, it seems to have passed me by. All I got was a way of being better and more myself.

My main response to Veva's friend would be, sure, maybe you don't need to learn anything else, but if you're into poetry, why wouldn't you want to talk about how it works, learn about other approaches etc.? And I think that's what we're doing here. Still, I agree that, in the end, there's no substitute for reading great work. I read a nice thing years ago about a literature teacher who never did anything except read aloud to his student. He'd walk into the classroom with a bag of books and just read. The author of the piece said he never learned more about literature than in those classes.

[PrinceMyshkin]

A mild dissent, blp, to your very lucid exposition. A script would need to be structured, wouldn't it - and so you might argues does poetry need that too but with poetry I think there needs to be anarchy first and then - just as there are patterns within chaos - the structure might be elicited.

[blp]

Yes, anarchy first. I'm basically for that. But don't you think that's sort of what a lot of young artist's and poet's need to learn? To open things up before they narrow them down?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Yes, anarchy first. I'm basically for that. But don't you think that's sort of what a lot of young artist's and poet's need to learn? To open things up before they narrow them down?

Maybe the hardest thing for them to do is to learn to love the 2nd & 3rd etc. draft process, to throw yourself down a flight of stairs and trust you'll be able to fix yourself up afterwards.

[Veva]

Honestly, I believe you are both right.. but I realized a few hours ago that my poetry is lacking in something vital - experience. I feel that my works, both poems and short stories have some sort of juvenile veil around them... :( (FYI I am only 18)
Can age limit you in any way? Have you ever felt limited?

[TheFifthElement]

(Here in England, there does seem to have been an idea during the hippyish seventies that learning grammar formally was somehow oppressive and it's created a generation of otherwise intelligent people who don't know what nouns and verbs are and, struggling to find the right preposition, often end up just guessing. 'That's disrespectful on me.' they'll say. The point is not that they have a different and equally valid way of saying the thing they want to say, but that they don't really have a way at all. You can hear the discomfort and uncertainty in their voices.)

I am a child of that generation, which explains, now, why I remember nothing about learning grammar at school and why I struggle now with punctuation! It feels like a handicap. Fortunately education begins when school ends.

All sound advice blp.


Honestly, I believe you are both right.. but I realized a few hours ago that my poetry is lacking in something vital - experience. I feel that my works, both poems and short stories have some sort of juvenile veil around them... :( (FYI I am only 18)
Can age limit you in any way? Have you ever felt limited?

Veva, I don't thin age limits you. Have a read of some of Bakiryu's poetry - she's younger than you. You just need to open yourself up to experience, really see what's going on around you, listen, taste, touch, smell. Don't just scratch the surface but dive right into things. Examine them. Let yourself absorb things and then turn it out in your own language, with your own vision and your own interpretation. Listen to your voice and express it, and don't be afraid of 'getting it wrong', there are only opinions. It is your voice, only you can really make the best of it.

[blp]

Maybe the hardest thing for them to do is to learn to love the 2nd & 3rd etc. draft process, to throw yourself down a flight of stairs and trust you'll be able to fix yourself up afterwards.

The inarguable voice of experience. For those who don't know, PM's actually taught poetry in college.



I am a child of that generation, which explains, now, why I remember nothing about learning grammar at school and why I struggle now with punctuation! It feels like a handicap.

I sympathise and am happy to say I don't think the problem's too hard to fix (not that it really shows with you anyway, at least online). I'll re-recommend the Strunk and White book, The Elements of Style. It's cheap, virtuously brief, available from the usual online booksellers and, in a large measure, a grammar book, but with a hefty emphasis on good written style. P.S. Your above statement does actually contain a punctuation error: you used an exclamation mark at the end of an ordinary sentence. Exclamation marks are for exclamations, e.g. Wow, yikes, golly, ouch. OK, I'm kidding. The above rule is true, but I don't really care about it because it doesn't have any real function in facilitating sense, just pedantry. I like to think that's not the purpose of grammar, but, well, sometimes it seems to be used that way.



Fortunately education begins when school ends.

Or when art school ends in my case.



Honestly, I believe you are both right.. but I realized a few hours ago that my poetry is lacking in something vital - experience. I feel that my works, both poems and short stories have some sort of juvenile veil around them... (FYI I am only 18)
Can age limit you in any way? Have you ever felt limited?

I have and the poems of mine that matter to me most come out of experience. In a sense, 18 years is quite a lot of experience, but you're probably right not to rest on those laurels. If you don't feel like boy genius Rimbaud yet, Prince's suggestion to read loads is probably key - and not just poetry. Even arch radicals like Kathy Acker and William Burroughs emphasise the need to do this, Burroughs stating baldly that bad writers were writers who didn't read enough.

The reason I immediately big up reading in this conversation about experience, rather than suggesting you go on a pony trek in Afghanistan or drop acid and join a sex commune, is that language is how we make sense of experience. Experience is a given. You're having an experience now, or, in fact, lots of them - sensations of temperature, comfort, discomfort, sounds, memories, breathing in a certain sort of way, relationships etc. The more you read, the more you see how even very slight seeming experience can be the stuff of great writing. Anyway, in the immortal words of the old Smiths song:

There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more, not much more.

Or, as Derrida said

There is nothing outside the text.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I have and the poems of mine that matter to me most come out of experience. In a sense, 18 years is quite a lot of experience...

The reason I immediately bring up reading in this conversation about experience, rather than suggesting you go on a pony trek in Afghanistan or drop acid and join a sex commune, is that language is how we make sense of experience. Experience is a given. You're having an experience now, or, in fact, lots of them - sensations of temperature, comfort, discomfort, sounds, memories, breathing in a certain sort of way, relationships etc. The more you read, the more you see how even very slight seeming experience can be the stuff of great writing. Anyway, in the immortal words of the old Smiths song:

There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more, not much more.



Emphasis added, but I think the whole of this is brilliant and if it registers with Veva, ought to free her to do what she wants to do, although the question might have been asked of her original post Why do you want to write poems, of all things? Why not, e.g. a manual on how to survive being 17? I ask that half in jest, of course, but I'd be interested if she cared to answer. There's a romantic glow around the concept of "Poet" - the heroic suffering! The noble sentiments! The vengeance wreaked on those who wounded us (or we thought they did...) But is the posture enough or mustn't one also - as I think you or someone else noted here - mustn't one also love the things one can do with language and line breaks and ambiguity and detail, detail, detail...?

[TheFifthElement]

I sympathise and am happy to say I don't think the problem's too hard to fix (not that it really shows with you anyway, at least online). I'll re-recommend the Strunk and White book, The Elements of Style. It's cheap, virtuously brief, available from the usual online booksellers and, in a large measure, a grammar book, but with a hefty emphasis on good written style. P.S. Your above statement does actually contain a punctuation error: you used an exclamation mark at the end of an ordinary sentence. Exclamation marks are for exclamations, e.g. Wow, yikes, golly, ouch. OK, I'm kidding. The above rule is true, but I don't really care about it because it doesn't have any real function in facilitating sense, just pedantry. I like to think that's not the purpose of grammar, but, well, sometimes it seems to be used that way.

Thanks blp. It is now on order. When I read Eats Shoots & Leaves it just made me depressed ;)

[blp]

Thanks, Prince. I'm glad you liked what I said and flattered. I agree, yours is a good question, though I'd add, just so there are no misunderstandings, if Veva or anyone else doesn't quite know how to answer it, they shouldn't be put off. The answer may be in the poetry itself.

Hope the book lives up to the build-up for you, 5th.

[Delta40]

I sound so naive Veva after reading these posts because I don't have the background and education that other members have. I woke up last year and felt I needed to give the poet within me a voice.

I wrote.

I don't know anything about it other than that which I write.

I imagine I will interest myself more as I go along. Your post prompts me to wonder, only idly, if this poses a problem.

What do you think?

[cogs]

the more you write, the quicker you'll develop a method.
regarding age, i was thinking that the other day, and i've come to think that inspiration can happen at any age. the spark will ignite a whole train of thought. i just write it all down, then take out the best parts. then get inspired all over again, and do the same.
next, i try to say the same thing with words that express the thought exactly,
which is why thesaurus.com (which also has a dictionary), is so important to me.
it's the ideas that are important, and their structure can only enhance their connections.

[Silas Thorne]

Great thread! I'm learning a lot as I travel through it.

I'm returning to poetry (or Poetry :) ) from a long absence. I never ceased to enjoy reading poetry, but I stopped writing it for a long time as I felt false to myself in the way I was writing.

[jon1jt]

I suppose resorting to some poetry guide is one way to kill any interest you may have in poetry, but if you must then so be it. You found this website so I imagine you've been exposed to some poems---some good, some maybe not. And at some point you must have formed an opinion about one or two, maybe discovered a poem that really moved you.

You want to be a poet, then start out with writing a line or two about anything and go from there. Then get some feedback and in the end follow your own voice.

The rest of the advice offered in this thread may come across to a novice as a bit abstract or philosophical and lead to scaring them off. Then again, the poster mentions 'emotios,' which says she knows more about poetry than I do, which for her is a good thing.

[blp]

I had a browse through this

http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Write-Poem-Study-Literature/dp/1405124806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231326750&sr=8-1

yesterday in my local bookshop and thought it seemed good. He begins by saying that, in beginning to think about poetry, it's pointless to ask what poetry is, better, perhaps, to wonder what it has been in the past and what it might be in the future.

[blp]

Was just commenting on Cellar Door's poem and remembered that these lines from Lorine Niedecker (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/poems.html) were some of my favourite by a poet on poetry:



Poet's Work

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery

and


...But what vitality! The women hold jobs--
clean house, cook, raise children, bowl
and go to church.

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

[TheFifthElement]

Meant to add Veva: WRITE!!! You'll learn more from doing than thinking about poetry. Write, and you'll find your voice.

So, when are you going to post some poetry ;)