Some Quick Tips on Writing Poetry

Ok, there are probably about a million ways to write a poem, but the five methods below help me when I’ve been stuck in a rut. By following one - or all - of these methods, you have a good chance of putting ink to paper and creating your first masterpiece. Here are my five ways to write poetry:
• .......................................... : One trap I can sometimes fall into is that, when I try to write a long poem, the poem becomes like a list of things (like love, hate, etc.). What always works better, for me anyway, is to focus on one moment that expresses an emotion or works as a metaphor for a bigger idea.
• .......................................... : My first scrapbook includes a poem titled “Eavesdropping”, which is basically several conversations I overheard while in airport terminals. I took notes in the terminals, and worked on the poem while doing my laundry at a laundrette. Listening to others can kick start poems because you’ll hear things you would never say or think yourself.
• .......................................... : Specificity strengthens a poem, and it’s hard to get more specific than throwing all your attention toward one thing or person. The only trap with these poems is that they can sometimes read like lists.
• .......................................... : Response poems have been around forever. In fact, an argument could be made that all poems are response poems. To what could your poem respond? For starters, you could respond to another poem, a piece of art, something someone said to you, a cool-looking car, etc. Nothing is off limits.
• .......................................... : This is kind of like eavesdropping, I suppose, but there are poems that will take a line from another person’s poem and make that the first line. In this tradition, it is also good form to cite the poem and poet in brackets at the end of your poem. How this can help is that you’ve already got a great line out of the way and just need to write the rest of the poem. How do you write poems? As I said above, there are other ways how to write poems, but these are some of my favourite techniques. If the five tips on how to make a poem mentioned above don’t work for you, that’s fine. One of the many rules of poetry is that there are no rules of poetry at all! (Reading text adapted from writersdigest)