The New York Times published an article last week covering recent releases of poetry collections from authors like Brian Turner who writes about the war in Iraq and Lightsey Darst and her first book, Find the Girl. Poetry, the article says, is a “necessary if underappreciated cultural work — that poetry, even when it’s snubbed by the broader culture, has no expiration date”. Surely it must be intimidating to approach a form of writing that is considered to be so timeless, let alone put together an entire book.

Poetry has been coming to me in all different forms lately, some of which I’ve been trying to write myself. I can tell you that while a little scary, writing poetry can be entertaining like putting together a puzzle or solving the hardest level Sudoku in the paper. Do you know how many rules there are? A lot. There are countless fun, challenging styles and I’ve recently decided to make it my personal mission to attempt as many of these different styles as possible. Many poems are like calculated equations and trying to make all of the variables come out even is proving to be quite difficult, but hopefully the practice will make me a stronger writer than I was pre-self-inflicted-poetry-madness.