Build the Basic Skills
You can be a basketball player without being in the NBA; you can be a singer without recording a hit record; you can be a poet without being published. If you write poems, you’re a poet, and this is for you.
I believe in poetry. I believe that the golden age of poetry in the English language hasn’t happened yet, that it lies not in our past but in our future. I believe that the poems of that golden age are yet to be written and that you might very well be the poet who writes them, and I want to help, which is why I’ve written Tips for Young Poets.
If learning to write poetry were like climbing stairs in a fifty story skyscraper, it’s taken me a lifetime to get to the 30th floor. I want it to happen faster for you, and I’m hoping that Guidelines for Young Poets can work like an elevator to get you to the half-way mark fast and with fresh legs, so you’ll have the time and courage to keep going and eventually, maybe, make it to the top.
View the 5 steps to building your skills:
Writing is rewriting
The trick to producing clean rhyme
Making rhythm
The secret of sound
Voice and Voices
