Craft & Developement

1. Read Your Poems Out Loud

Your ear catches problems that your eye misses. When you read silently, your brain automatically fixes awkward rhythms and unclear phrases. When you read aloud, you hear exactly what you've written.

Read slowly and pay attention to where you stumble, where you run out of breath, where the rhythm feels off. These are usually places where the poem needs work. Poetry is fundamentally an aural art form, even when it's read silently.

If you're embarrassed to read aloud, record yourself and listen back. You'll hear your poems differently and catch issues you missed on the page. This is especially important if you ever plan to read your work publicly.

2. One Image Per Poem

Beginning poets often try to cram every interesting image they can think of into a single poem. This creates confusion rather than richness. Instead, choose one strong image and develop it fully throughout the poem. If you start to talk about how you feel like a beach no one goes to. Keep your imagery to sunlight, sand crashing waves, feeling buried in sand, birds, sunset feelings.

A well-developed image can carry an entire poem. Think of how Sharon Olds uses a single moment or object to explore complex emotions, or how Mary Oliver can find the universe in a single natural observation. Depth beats breadth every time.

This doesn't mean every line has to refer to the same image, but your central image should anchor the poem and provide a through-line that readers can follow. Everything else should support or complicate that central image.

3. Cut Your First Stanza

Nine times out of ten, your poem's real beginning is in the second stanza. The first stanza is usually you warming up, circling around your subject, getting ready to say what you actually mean.

Try this experiment: take any poem you've written and delete the first stanza. Does the poem still make sense? Does it actually start more effectively? Often, cutting the opening forces you to trust your reader's intelligence and gets you to the heart of the poem faster.

This doesn't mean every poem should start in the middle of the action, but it does mean you should question whether your opening lines are doing necessary work or just filling space.

4. End with Something Concrete

Abstract endings might feel profound when you're writing them, but they often leave readers nowhere to land. Instead of ending with big statements about love or death or the meaning of life, try ending with something specific and physical. I miss being held. I want to feel less, I miss you so damn much, etc. Then make it a fresher image.

A concrete ending gives readers an image to hold onto and makes your abstract ideas feel grounded in the real world. It also trusts readers to make the emotional or intellectual leap themselves, which is more powerful than telling them what to think.

Look at how great poems end: often with a specific image that contains the poem's emotional weight without explicitly stating it. The image does the work of conclusion without feeling like a moral or lesson.

5. Write Toward the Thing You Don't Want to Say

The poem you're avoiding is usually the one that needs to exist. We avoid certain subjects because they feel too personal, too painful, or too risky. But those are exactly the subjects that produce the most authentic and necessary poems.

This doesn't mean you have to share every personal detail or trauma. It means you should pay attention to what makes you uncomfortable and explore why. Often, the thing you don't want to say is the thing that connects most deeply with readers. Write down first, what the hell is going on.

You can start by writing 'around' the difficult subject. Circle it, approach it from different angles, tell related stories. Eventually, you'll find a way to approach the heart of the matter that feels both honest and powerful.

5 Tips for Poets Breaking Through Writer's Block

1. Write Bad Poems on Purpose

Writer's block often comes from the pressure to write something good. When you sit down determined to write the perfect poem, you paralyze yourself before you start. Instead, commit to writing something terrible.

Set a timer for ten minutes and write the worst poem you can imagine. Use clichés, make it sentimental, rhyme "love" with "dove." The goal is to move your hand across the page without judgment. Often, something interesting emerges from the wreckage.

This exercise works because it removes the stakes. You're not trying to create art—you're just playing with language. And play is where creativity lives. Some of my best poems started as intentionally bad ones that took an unexpected turn.

2. Steal First Lines from Novels

When you're stuck, open any book to a random page and use the first complete sentence you see as your poem's opening line. Don't worry about it making sense—just follow where it leads you.

This technique works because it bypasses the blank page problem. You're not starting from nothing—you're responding to something that already exists. The constraint forces you to be creative within boundaries, which often produces more interesting results than complete freedom.

You can delete the borrowed line later if you want, but often it transforms so much in the context of your poem that it becomes genuinely yours. The goal is to get your brain moving, not to plagiarize.

3. Write in Grocery Stores

Poetry happens everywhere, not just at your desk. Carry a small notebook and write in places where you overhear conversations, observe human behavior, and encounter the mundane details that make great poems.

Grocery stores are perfect because they're full of specific details: brand names, overheard conversations, the particular way people behave when they're focused on their lists. These details ground your poems in the real world and make them more accessible to readers.

The point isn't to write polished poems in public—it's to capture raw material that you can work with later. Some of my best poems started as grocery store observations that I developed weeks later.

4. Copy Poems You Love by Hand

This old-fashioned exercise teaches you how great poems work in ways that just reading them cannot. When you copy a poem by hand, you feel the rhythm in your muscles, notice the line breaks more carefully, and absorb the poet's decision-making process.

Choose poems you love but don't fully understand. The act of copying forces you to slow down and pay attention to every word choice, every punctuation mark, every structural decision. You'll start to understand why the poet made certain choices.

Don't copy to imitate—copy to learn. After you've copied a few poems by the same poet, you'll start to see patterns in their work that you can adapt to your own voice and concerns.

 5. Change Your Writing Tool

If you always write on a computer, try a pen. If you always use a pen, try typing. If you always write in a notebook, try loose sheets of paper. Small changes in your physical writing process can unlock different parts of your brain.

Different tools encourage different kinds of thinking. Handwriting tends to be more associative and less linear. Typing encourages revision and rearrangement. Voice recording captures the natural rhythm of speech.

The goal isn't to find the "right" tool—it's to keep your creative process flexible. When you're stuck with one approach, switching tools can help you see your work from a new angle.

Submissions & Publishing

1. Submit to Three Journals at Once, Not Thirty

The shotgun approach to submissions is a waste of time and money. When you submit to thirty journals at once, you're essentially admitting you haven't done your homework. You're hoping something will stick rather than targeting places that actually want your work.

Instead, research three journals thoroughly. Read their recent issues, understand their aesthetic, and submit work that fits their vision. This focused approach leads to higher acceptance rates and builds meaningful relationships with editors. You'll also save money on submission fees and avoid the emotional roller coaster of twenty-seven rejections arriving in the same week.

The three-journal rule forces you to be strategic. You can't just fire off your latest poem everywhere—you have to think about where it belongs. This makes you a better editor of your own work and a more thoughtful participant in the literary community.

2. Read the Damn Magazine Before You Submit

This seems obvious, but most poets skip this step entirely. They look at a journal's name, maybe scan their website, and hit submit. Then they wonder why their confessional narrative poems keep getting rejected by experimental journals.

Reading the magazine tells you everything you need to know: what length poems they prefer, whether they like formal verse or free verse, if they're interested in political work or prefer the personal. You'll also discover poets you didn't know about and get a sense of the conversation you're trying to join.

If you can't afford to buy every journal, most have sample poems online, or you can read them at your local library or university. The point isn't to imitate what they publish—it's to understand whether your work fits their mission. An hour of reading can save you months of inappropriate submissions.

3. Your Bio Should Be One Sentence If You're Starting Out

New poets often write biographical paragraphs listing every workshop they've attended and every local reading they've participated in. This screams amateur. Editors care about your publication history, not your MFA status or your day job (unless it's directly relevant to the poems).

If you're just starting out, keep it simple: "Jane Smith writes poetry in Cleveland" or "This is John's first publication." There's no shame in being new. Editors would rather see honesty than inflated credentials.

As you build a publication history, you can expand your bio to include your most impressive credits. But even established poets should keep bios concise. Three sentences maximum. Your poems should speak for themselves.

4. Simultaneous Submissions Are Your Friend

Most journals now accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can submit the same poem to multiple places at once. This dramatically speeds up the publication process and increases your chances of acceptance.

The key is being organized and ethical about it. Use a spreadsheet or Submittable's tracking features to keep track of where you've sent what. When a poem gets accepted, immediately withdraw it from everywhere else. Most journals make this easy with a simple email or button click.

Some poets worry that simultaneous submissions are somehow disrespectful, but journals expect it now. The alternative—waiting six months for a rejection before submitting elsewhere—is inefficient for everyone involved.

5. Rejection Is Data, Not Personal Attack

Every rejection tells you something useful, even if it doesn't feel that way. Generic rejections might mean your work doesn't fit that journal's aesthetic. Personal rejections with feedback are gold—they mean an editor saw something worth responding to.

Keep track of your rejections. If three different journals reject the same poem for being "too abstract," maybe the poem needs more concrete imagery. If formal journals love your work but literary magazines don't, you're learning about your strengths and your audience.

The most successful poets I know treat rejection as market research. They adjust their submission strategy based on patterns they notice, not based on how the rejections make them feel.