Dear Budding Poet:

Dear Budding Poet: Modern poetry is a sandbox for all who would build, smash, trash, shake up, and take up the art. Poetry is not writ, nor wrote, or written, but is hummed through the nose, and planted on paper with plenty of mulch. Poetry hits your ears, dearly, your heart, smartly, your tongue, sung, but your nose is out, neither up or down, but set to the work of dreaming the future. Most important to know about writing poetry, is citing poetry, deep in the text where no one will know, except poets. Poets are exceptional at word play, sound play, form play, sometimes formal, sometimes pictorial. Take poetry seriously, study hard, erase soft, soften spaces until they chase each other around your metaphor and laugh heartily. Metrical and metaphor are walking in tune with each other, they are your muse and amusement, don’t let them go one letter further and become nutty or nothing. Don’t ever expect the staircase to remain solid, it will dive toward the well from which all poetry comes and deliver up a fish, symbolically feeding the crowd. Instead, measure, time, and youtube yourself chanting, and take pleasure however the pace and voice delivers. Rage against the comma in CAPITAL LETTERS, try short hand, long hand, type as fast as you please. Please your interests with poems from every cupboard and cranny hidden in your mind and body and soul experience. And when you do all I have suggested, you will have what I have, pounds of paper poems to review your life in stunning emotion and time stamping nuance. You will speak up, make up nonsense, cry and weep and scream and its all allowed because you are not too old, you’re a poet. People will follow you everywhere, picking up your lost pages. Be inspired to write on Trumpets and other musical means, on swamp grass and potash and pickles by the barrel. Ignore love, rage, politics though they creep through the dictionary after you and follow the clouds arising and the sun setting and the fish or frogs jumping until you find awe. Never forget the blues, the violets, the oranges, and anything specific they get you in the gut. Then find a hundred ways to thank. If you care to have a read of my work, try “Golfer Talking Trash”, “George Gershwin Terzanelle”, “Lakeside Ghazal”, “Thousand Pieces of Puzzle Present”, “Equus Poeticus Variabilis”, “How Dreams are Born at Fifteen”, “Machu Pichu”, “Trust in You”, “Painting My Husband” and “My Observations.” I started writing in a diary at fourteen and haven’t stopped. I worked in computing before I studied writing and I’ve studied writing for the past sixteen years. I earned an MFA degree writing about my family in a memoir. I get published occasionally; more frequently when younger, most my real favorite poems I’ve written are nowhere to be seen, so enjoy your moments of writing poetry. Free Write Poetry is a good name for a poetry book for newcomers, it’s very punny. Take care, Sheri