Throughout my entire schooling career, I was a left-brain thinker. Math made sense. It had a right and a wrong. It felt like the only solid base in a chaotic world, spawned by a tumultuous home life. This was combined with incompetent and out of touch teachers and terrible examples of poetry that I simply couldn’t relate to. I was left feeling that at best the entire artform was beyond me, and at worst that it was a refuge for pomposity and prose, written by people who have experienced less than they would ever write.…

Poetry is just words on a page.

Anything beyond that definition risks falling into a philosophical or literary debate that would amount to such an abstraction of the beauty of the artform as to render it pointless. There are no rules. No restrictions. No limits to what you can and can’t, or to what you should and shouldn’t do.

A lot of this book will help you to hone that expression, giving you tips, tools, and tricks to make it more evocative. But that is all just make up and window dressing. Expression is the key. Some people gravitate towards rhymes and structure, others to free-flowing verse, others still, to long form paragraphs or books, crafting each line with meticulous care. It is all just writing. It is all just words on a page. It is all just poetry…