If you haven’t lost a loved one, it will be exceedingly hard to capture the complexities that such a loss would entail. Life is full of different emotional experiences, some of which will have happened to you. I’d advise, at least in the beginning, to focus your efforts there. This doesn’t mean you have to limit your poetry to those life events, but rather to using the emotions that you have experienced to inform and colour your work. With some introspection and imagination, you can extrapolate the emotional state that may arise from a more extreme version of a situation you have lived through…

Nothing is lamer than an attempt to force a narrative, political opinion, or a buzz word topic into your poetry. Unless you are passionate about it and extremely competent, the result will come across as tacky, and importantly, it won’t be impactful to the reader. I care about a multitude of issues, but I only put to paper the poems that come to me naturally. I am never happy with the results of forced poetry. After a month or two away from the piece, I find myself cringing at how obviously contrived my work was. Of course, I am critical of my normal poetry, but it is not in the same way. I had a few ‘forced’ poems that I could have included in my books, but I cut them all as I no longer feel what I supposedly felt when writing them originally, and upon reflection I don’t think I ever felt that way…