This week: You Can Be a Poet! Edited by: Lilli Munster 🦇 ☕  
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"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
~W. H. Auden
"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."
~Khalil Gibran
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
~Robert Frost
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."
~William Wordsworth
"Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere."
~Henry David Thoreau |
A poem is a piece of writing characterized by a deliberate arrangement of words chosen for their sound and meaning to convey ideas, emotions, or tell a story. Poetry often employs elements such as rhyme, rhythm, meter, and figurative language to create a concentrated, imaginative, and rhythmic effect. Unlike prose, poems typically use lines and stanzas for formatting, and line breaks and white space improve the reading experience. While there are many forms of poems, such as sonnets and haiku, a poem doesn’t need a strict structure or rhyme to be considered poetry.
 Key Elements of a Poem
Choose your words carefully.
Select words for their sound, imagery, and symbolic meaning. Use them in a condensed way to pack layers of meaning into fewer words.
Sound Matters
Rhyme, rhythm, and meter make things musical and help memory and appeal.
Figurative Language
Techniques such as metaphors, similes, personification, and imagery are employed to convey complex ideas and emotions imaginatively.
Structure
Poems often feature distinct formatting, such as stanzas (groups of lines) and deliberate line breaks, which guide the reader and contribute to the rhythm.
Emotion
One of the primary goals of poetry is to stir a particular emotional response in the reader or listener.
Forms of Poetry
Structured Poems
These follow specific rules for length, rhyme scheme, syllable counts, and meter, such as sonnets (14-line poems) or haiku (three-line poems).
Free Verse
Poems in free verse do not adhere to a strict metrical pattern or rhyme scheme.
Prose Poems
These pieces employ vivid imagery and poetic techniques, but are formatted like paragraphs, resembling prose.
What a Poem Doesn’t Need
Specific Length
Poems can be any length, from a short haiku to a lengthy epic.
Punctuation or Capital Letters
Some poets may choose to omit or alter traditional punctuation and capitalization to create a unique effect.
Rhyme
Not all poems have rhyme; free verse poems, for example, are often unrhymed.
So, as you can see, the guidelines for what constitutes poetry are fairly flexible. Get out there and experiment, try something new, create your own form, forge a new path. Don't be discouraged, keep writing, and I promise you will find your audience. |
| | | Broken souls (13+)
enjoy feel free to give feedback:) This poem is about the anxiety and the emotions we feel
#2346024 by Shan_writes  |
| |  | Tomorrow (E)
A poem that came to me as I was thinking about what to do after I graduate.
#1858817 by Mindertwenty |
| | | Revolution (E)
Prompt/Week # 2 -Use these words in your poem: KISS - DAYBREAK - TEAR (or tears)
#2345767 by Fyn  |
|
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Comment(s) received from my last Poetry newsletter, "A Closer Look" :
JCosmos  wrote:
This was a good posting. A factoid, this poem was Nelson Mandela's favorite poem. He recited it daily while in prison and after being released. That would have been good to note.
Thanks for this info! I was not aware of it. |
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Poetry: September 03, 2025 Issue [#13326]
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