On Writing Poetry

Writing poetry is easy, y’all should try it. Post it to Instagram in a story and no one will ever need to look at it again if you don’t want them to. Sure there’s a bit of a learning curve on meter, but if you pretend like it works, the worst people will say is that you were stretching on a line (and even then, the only people to actually tell you that will be related to you).

I personally prefer the ballad format that is formed of stanzas of 4-3-4-4 iambs and a ABCB rhyme pattern, but you can do you. Write a sonnet, make Shakespeare proud. Write a limerick (and you’ll be a better poet than I am). Write prose and then add line breaks - it’s free verse.¹ Write an acrostic with someone’s name and then proceed to have literally no one notice that it’s an acrostic which is awkward because you proceed to premise a cipher on people understanding that.² Write a story where the mysterious door keeper speak only in riddles and rhymes. Write a song but forget the music. Write. Please. It’s fun, I promise.

Footnotes

1. This is actually a
   really neat thing
   that you can do
   with pretty much any piece of text,
   though it works best
   when you use
   the line breaks
   frequently,
   rather than at
   the end of paragraphs. ↩

2. Any resemblance to events real or fictional is completely coincidental ↩