Living Poets Society

I've been asked how to write a poem.

It's simple.

Or maybe not so simple.

Whatever. You chose.

First, you think of something that means to you. Like something that happened. Or something you're looking at. Or an emotion. Or an emotion derived from looking at something. Or an emotion derived from something that happened to something you're looking at.

I'll stop now.

Second, you think of an interesting way of phrasing it. I often start with random prose only to realize that its structure can be changed to be a poem. So I change it to be a poem. Think of yourself as a rhetorician. Someone who churns out new phrases, ones which haven't been thought of before. Like a phrase-monger. Or, resort to using old phrases. I'm sure half of what I've written has appeared somewhere else in bits and pieces. Statistics and probability almost requires it.

Lastly, you pour out your ideas onto a page as expressively or un-expressively as you chose to do so. Its your writing. You give it life, you breath into it the meanings you want. Poems do not need a cadence or a rhyme to it. It just needs to flow from your heart. Or it can flow from your head, though I've yet to see a poem describing the beauty of a gauge boson.

Just keep in mind that there are no rules. That's the sheer beauty of poetry.

To express yourself with no limitations, no rules.