From Writing Poetry by David Kirby

  1. Write in sentences. Isolated images and poetic fragments will succeed occasionally, of course, but they will never pull together into a coherent whole. You will want all of your poems to affect your reader not just small part of it.
  2. Use concrete language. Include details. Appeal to the five senses. Remember fiction is essentially narrative, and poetry is essentially metaphor. You will never be able to get your emotions down on paper but you can way why you feel the way you do, and the result will be that the reader will have the same feeling that you do. This means that using concrete language to tell me why the rich are so detestable or what it is about me that makes you want to mine always.
  3. Employ standard usage. The real energy in a poem comes from fresh combinations of familiar words and ideas.
  4. Write free verse, or at least avoid rhymes which force you to sacrifice ideas in favor of nursery rhyme sounds. Another point about rhyme: be careful not to confuse a song with a poem. One relies on music to complete it, whereas the other stands alone.
  5. Title each poem effectively. Titles are more than mere conveniences; they add meaning to a poem. Good titles are hard to come up with. Yet the struggle is worth it. And remember, while any title is better than none, a good title will get the reader’s attention, it might even make a mediocre poem seem better than it is.
  6. Type your poems. Mastery of spacing, line length, and stanzas is essential; poetry is verbal, but it has a graphic dimension as well, and the way a poem looks determines how it is received.
  7. Start small. Most beginning writers tackle the big themes: love, death, the meaning of life. But don’t we already know everything there is to know about these subjects? So start small…
  8. Write about what you remember. It is a commonplace that you should write about what you know, but usually the present is too close for us to see it clearly. We have to move away for the events in our lives before we can them in such a way that we can write about them engagingly.
  9. Be a sponge; Shakespeare was. His plays are based on historical accounts and on lesser plays by earlier playwrights. So what are you, better than Shakespeare?
  10. Play dumb. Just about anything can be turned into a poem if you play dumb about it because when you’re smart, everything makes sense to you and you go about your business, whereas when you’re dumb, you have to slow down, stop, figure things out.
  11. Reverse your field. When you catch yourself on the verge of saying something obvious, don’t just stop; instead, say the opposite of what you were going to say in the first place. Listen to the poet within you.
  12. Give yourself time. I have a friend whose daughter is learning how to cook. But she’s a little impatient, so when she has a recipe that says to bake the cake at 350 degrees for thirty minutes, she doesn’t see why you can’t cook it at 700 degrees for fifteen minutes. If you take this approach to poetry, your poems are going to end up like my friend’s daughter’s cakes, charred on the outside and raw on the middle. If you saw a stunningly handsome stranger walking down the street, would you run up to him and shout, “Marry me”? Of course not – he might say yes! Poems are the same way, and if you try to make them yours too soon, you won’t be happy with the results. I promise you. Be coy, be flirtatious; dray the poem out a little and see what it’s really about. There’s no hurry…
  13. Find a perfect reader… Pass your poems around until you find the one person who can show you their strengths and weaknesses without inflating or deflating your ego too much.