Sometimes I will ‘finish’ a poem, but I won’t be totally satisfied with the result. Something feels off. Incomplete. Forced. Contrived. Or just not ‘me’. When this happens, I sleep on it – literally. I will save the poem and return to it the next day and take another go at it…

You want to carefully consider the name of your poem. Often the name will come from a word or a line within the poem that best exemplifies its meaning. You want to choose a word or phrase that is catchy and symbolic. Consider the names of most of the poems presented in this book and you will see that I usually adhere to this rule. …

Consider how you want the poem to ‘look’ on the page. Make an active choice about its alignment, paragraph structure, title, and the use of capitalizations and grammar (or lack thereof). You are the artist and therefore you will want the words on the page to transmit to the reader in a certain way. These choices help to make that happen – of course, the reader is free to take your work however they like! Just be internally consistent within the poem…

Good writing involves two versions of yourself working on the one piece of work: Artist-You and Editor-You. These two versions of you, must work alone as it is almost impossible to write and edit at the same time.

Firstly, Artist-You gets into the zone, isolates themselves from the world, drinks copious amounts of coffee, does a five-minute headstand, prays to the gods, then does the myriad of other things they feel is necessary for them to get the words going goodly. They write until spent, then they put the piece aside and write something else.…