The Truth About Writing Poetry

1. Get a piece of paper, scrap of semi-used napkin, blank wall in your house, anything with space screaming for substance.  
2. Get something to write with; pen, pencil, blood of the infidels, … whatever medium you believe will convey your message best.
3. Now you have to think. When it comes to poetry (or rather any good piece of creative writing) it isn’t about writing the world as you see it, but rather about writing the world the way it is. This requires you to look at the ways in which things work, see the complete arbitrariness of it all, and write from a point of view people find hard to see but can understand (granted, this understanding might take time). Anyone can describe what they see or what something means to them; the key is to describe all these basic things in a way people haven’t hear before or thought of.
4. Don’t worry, sometimes the words come out in bits and pieces or in jumbled-up groupings crying for attention. The important thing to remember is that all good writing takes time. Those first few words you scribble down are going to be ok, the next hundred better, the next thousand good, and maybe after a million words it’ll be decent enough to publish. So when you flip through a book of poems and see only thirty word on a page, that doesn’t mean the writer only wrote thirty words. That poem contains thousands of words. Ideas and concepts are incomprehensibly large. The art of the poem, to me, is the ability to paint these in just the right amount of letters.

~M

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