Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.