How To Write Decent Poetry

This is a Guest Post from Juniper

Poetry is a form of art. Thus, there is no such thing as concrete rules for poetry, merely there are rules of Writing and Language that can be applied. Even still, poems break from these. Today, there is a constant debate in the literary world about what defines poetry.

Nate’s Favourite Poems: To A Mouse by Robert Burns

To A Mouse by Robert Burns is a poem I only recently discovered about two months or so ago, but it is truly awesome. As Burns is Scottish the poem is plainly in the Scottish style, and was supposedly written after he turned up a mouse’s nest on his farm.
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, [...]

Why you should read poetry…

YWS is cool for a bazillion different reasons. One of these bazillion reasons is that we actually hold fiction and poetry on an equal level. Many other writing sites, believe it or not, do not do this and either specialize in poetry or fiction.
With that said, I’ve been browsing the poetry forums and, to be [...]

Nate’s Favourite Poems: The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

I first came across The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll in eighth grade. A bunch of us signed up to do a speech contest at Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, MD. There were a lot of categories to choose from, but I chose to recite a poem. Flicking through a book of poems (I [...]

Nate’s Favourite Poems: Casey At Bat

Last time, I showcased “Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen. This time around, it’s “Casey At Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, which is another one of those poems I pull out whenever a young boy says poetry is for girls.
Read the whole poem after the jump.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

So I’m sitting here writing a story whilst watching the Boondock Saints, and I was reminded of one of my favorite poems: “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen.
Whenever I’m tutoring, or really doing pretty much anything, and a boy says he hates poetry, I always ask of him the inevitable “Why?” And he [...]