Submit Your Poetry-Lesson Number One: What Kind of Writer Are You?

My intention is to give a small lesson each week, after which-in the comment thread below-I will help edit a poem written by whichever brave soul out there is willing to submit one.

My reason for doing this:

After reading a good bit of the poetry on Steemit, I felt it might be beneficial to suggest a few things.

To begin with, I hope that none of what I’m about to say seems critical. By no means am I trying to discourage writing. I simply want to help.

Saying this, if you are someone who writes a little here and there whenever you feel happy or sad, you are not the writer I want to help. I applaud you for writing down your feelings. It’s a wonderful way to release pent up emotion. Catharsis is essential to life. But I refer to this kind of writing as vent writing. Much of Steemit’s poetry falls under this category. These poems read like rhyming journal entries. They are generally extremely personal, unspecific, use metaphor, and are centered down the middle of the page (for reasons I don’t understand). I’m rambling.

The writers I am trying to help are those who want to be poets.

Lesson One:

What makes a poet?

It doesn’t require much besides time and practice. But the most important thing a poet can do is read. By reading, the poet acquires not only words, but concepts, stories, ideas, and even more significantly, style. There is no such thing as original style. Yet, if the poet reads and emulates not one or two but eight writers, they end sounding like none of the eight, but something entirely new. Saying this, the poet doesn’t even necessarily need to read poetry. But every piece of information that enters the poet will in some way impact them, either positively or negatively. What the poet reads is just as important as reading itself. Read the classics. Read contemporary poets and writers, those however, who have already been deemed this generation’s greats. These lists are not hard to find. So, summing up lesson number one. Read. And please, you should no better, social media articles do not apply, this one included. There’s nothing wrong with reading Steemit, as long as your reading the good stuff with it.

Oh yeah…and what makes me credible? You’re just going to have to trust me.

Writer/poet Recommendations:

Terrence Hayes

Michael Ondaatje

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

(image from flickr)