I’ve been reading and writing and thinking about poetry a lot lately. I’ll soon have enough for another book. What I’ve been thinking about has been its construction. In many ways it’s a lot like writing an essay. It has a topic, a beginning, middle and an end. It needs minimal but accurate punctuation, and it should make your point as concisely as possible, otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of extraneous and fluffy words that mean nothing. A person I knew once announced that poetry should be obscure. He doesn’t know how close he came to being smacked into obscurity himself that day.
Poetry is a concise use of words. It has shape. It has a subject. It has a concluding point. Otherwise it’s not of much use. In otherwise say what you mean. This means don’t be afraid of what friends and neighbours think about you. Some will say yes with a capital Y and an exclamation point. Others will jeer. More polite ones will say: “That’s nice,” and keep their opinions about you to themselves.
