How to Write a Poem

Carry a notebook or a notes file for a week and collect lines, overheard phrases and things you saw. Don't judge them yet. When you sit down to write, pick the one that still makes you feel something, and write for ten minutes without stopping or fixing anything. Most poems are found in a messy first draft, not planned in advance. If nothing comes, a prompt that gives you an object, a place and a person is enough to start.

A useful test: could a camera record it? Folded glasses, a cold cup of coffee, a coat still on its hook can all be filmed; "sadness" and "loss" can't. Abstract words are not banned, but a poem built only from them reads like a summary. Give each feeling one or two images, and leave room for the reader to make the connection.

Try both. Write the first draft in free verse, then try putting it into a fixed form and see what the rules force you to find. A sonnet's fourteen lines usually turn somewhere after the eighth, which is a good shape for a poem that changes its mind. A haiku asks for one image and one moment, which teaches compression. A villanelle's repeated lines suit an obsession, a memory or a feeling you can't put down.

Read your draft aloud and mark where you naturally breathe; those are candidate breaks. Then look at the words that end each line. If most of them are "the", "and" or "of", the breaks are probably accidental. Group lines into stanzas the way you would group sentences into paragraphs: a new stanza for a new image, a shift in time or a change of thought.

If you want rhyme, decide on a rhyme scheme and try near rhymes ("home" and "stone") as well as full ones, so you have more words to choose from. Meter, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, is the other tool: iambic pentameter, five da-DUM beats a line, is the rhythm of most English sonnets and of Shakespeare's speeches. Alliteration and assonance add music without rhyme, as long as they don't call attention to themselves.

Clichés are comparisons that have stopped making pictures: "heart of gold", "cold as ice", "tears like rain". When one appears in a draft, ask what the thing you are describing is actually like, for you, in this poem. Personification, giving a human action to an object or an idea, works the same way: "the house held its breath" earns its place only if it shows something the plain sentence couldn't.

Many poems turn near the end: the speaker sees the subject differently, the tone shifts, or a small detail takes on a larger meaning. Look for that turn in your draft. Your title can do work the poem doesn't: set the scene, name the occasion or add a second meaning. Choose it last.

Try a few experiments on a copy: start the poem at the second stanza, end it a line earlier, change it from past to present tense or from "I" to "you". Keep what works. Before you call it finished, give it to one reader and ask which line they remember, not whether they liked it. That line tells you where the poem's energy is.

Most magazines want unpublished work, and a poem posted on a public blog or social media can count as published, so check before you post. Keep a list of where each poem has gone, and send it out again the same week a rejection arrives. A local workshop or writing group is also a good place to share drafts and hear how a poem sounds to someone else.