A Poetic Philosophy -- How to be a better poet.

A poet has neither direction nor motive; he writes to appease the sheer will of his pen.

Logical fallacies, along with the rest of the informal fallacies, are your new best friends; make peace with them and you've made peace with your pen. Tame them and you've turned your pen into a weapon.

The best poetry can be read backwards with just as much affect as if read forwards.
Be a slave to form and form will reward you with the gift of ambiguity. Like the logical fallacies, one must learn to use ambiguity to ones own intent.

There is always a way to reach a desired conclusion. You may be forced to  extend your passage to reach a desired outcome. If you cannot do so, pick a different rhyme family, and start over, or employ the use of alliteration.

One should know the most common rhyming families, and make use of them where appropriate. Overuse of common families may result in a sort of malaise that you will suffer from when re-reading your poetry. To avoid this, use less common rhyme schemes or try something new and more challenging.

If you feel that you have outgrown a six verse poem with rhyming couplets. Then try a twelve verse poem with rhyming quatrains.

Do not get caught up on punctuation in the beginning, proper punctuation will come about as a result of practice.

In some poems I interchange the 'm' sound and 'n' sound (maim and cane), as well as the 'th' and 'ief' (grief and sheath). These two groups are so closely related that I really don't see the harm, others may disagree.

Alliteration is equally as important as rhyme; as alliteration is rhyme, but in different syllables of a word and not just the last, it is also an effective tool to use to give length to any given line and still maintain pentameter or whatever scale you are using.

Idioms are a poets best friend.. get to know the ones you are not already familiar with. Make up idioms if you cant find any that work, and don't tell anyone that I told you that.

Allegory is another useful tool to an adept poet. The full arsenal of tools available to a poet make maintaining traditional fixed form a breeze so long as you are able to think outside the box.

Chronological writing is important, as you want your poem to read fluidly and not bounce around every-which way with when and what has happened in your poem; because it can be confusing.

It may help you to do exercises to maintain proper adherence to these tools. An example of which would be 'Metered Myopia' fav.me/d7lcl6f is a good way to practice alliteration.

You want your poems to be dynamic and versatile. If you continue to blabber on about how your life is horrible or how flowers are pretty you'll never progress as a poet. You must always be willing and avidly trying to break boundaries, come up with different rules, and play mind games. A good example of this would be my own 'A Mindless Obtrusion' fav.me/d7feu8t in which I broke as many idioms apart as I possibly could. Doing exercises like this will improve you as a poet.

Exercises:

1. Make a poem with as many alliterations as you can think of for a letter that you pick. Example: Martians manifest more marketable mixtures of malleable metals than most matallurgists. Try to come up with at least five complete sentences. They do not have to make complete sense, but this will help your poetry writing. Practice more if you wish to improve your poetry writing. fav.me/d7lcl6f

2. Make a poem using idioms. Again, I did this with 'A Mindless Obtrusion', but you can feel free to bend the rules in any different way you so desire. fav.me/d7feu8t

3. Make a poem about the logical fallacies. I have not done this, but it sounds like a fun and interesting idea, so don't be surprised if you see me post something of the sort in the near future.

4. Make a poem (and it doesn't have to make complete sense) that adheres STRICTLY to rhyme scheme. Make it about how you hate doing homework, if you would like. Disregard any errors in logic. Repeat this until they start making sense. Please, anyone who would like help in becoming a better poet, do not hesitate to ask, as I am not against giving critiques.

This is all I am going to address today, any entrigues you may have feel free to message me or just leave it in the comments below.

Thank you and I wish you all a world of luck!