I write this with no claims to education or mastery of the art form. Rather, as an autodidact poet-in-training, I am ever humbled by my own efforts at poetry.  It is an exquisite obsession whose practice, over lengthy time, has revealed some of its truths to me. I offer them here for consideration or reflection.

If poetry will ever find wider appeal, garner deeper affection, two things appear necessary. One is perhaps obvious, the other less so.  Poetry needs to be read by people other than poets. In order for more of that to happen, poetry needs to be better understood by poets themselves.

Poetry is an eccentric literary species, with each poem an organic entity possessed of its idiosyncratic metaphysical biology. It is as different from prose as are mice from men.  The taxonomy of poetry, I believe, has more affinity with drama, and even more affinity with musical…