: How do you manage all the different aspects of writing poetry? Every time I try to write a poem I find myself incredibly stuck. It feels to me like poetry has so many different aspects- meter,

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When I was first starting out with poetry (and indeed, even to a certain extent today), I liked to begin with structure/meter, choosing a simple, regular structure and improvising an almost non-sensical set of words which had a good ring to them.

Next, I continued to practice, this time fitting rhymes at the end of my lines. I started with rhyming couplets, moving to longer rhyming stanzas. Now I had somewhat surreal rhyming lines set to a pleasing meter with a good ring to them.

After that - editing, editing, editing. Tweaking the poem rhyme by rhyme, line by line, phrase by phrase, slowly knocking more and more meaning into the lines - cutting everything I couldn't make work and continuously introducing new lines, and new rhymes, until I had a poem which actually came together. After that, keep reading through it, top to bottom, knocking out the dents and areas where it jars or doesn't properly flow.

Finally - you need to be extremely tough on cutting line out lines which just aren't working. If you have three amazing, perfect, flawless lines, but cannot for the life of you find a fourth line to fit, those three lines have to be cut or drastically reworked. Back to the drawing board, time to try again.

Addendum. Keep reading! You can never read enough and if you want to write good poetry, read good (and indeed, bad) poetry.

I cannot ever get enough of listening to musicals. I love them so much - listening to them over and over and over again, then improvising my own words on the end, jotting them down as I sing (or voice recording myself for transcription later), then editing, editing editing until I have the song I want, and swapping out the music.

I appreciate this question is old but maybe this will help someone.

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1) Stop fixing everything at once.

Write your first round to get it on paper.

On your second round, pick one thing to fix: sharpen your rhymes, for example.

Next round, work on the meter.

Let it sit for a day. Come back with fresher eyes and work on word choice.

2) Kill your darlings.

Editing oneself is one of the hardest parts of writing. What this phrase means is that you have to be willing to let go of the perfectly-turned phrase, the elegantly metered couplet, if it doesn't fit the particular poem it's in. Put it in a slush file and start the line over. Rewrite the entire poem if you can't extract the line that's blocking you.

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The best advice I can give you on this can be summed up in one word: practice. The more poetry you write, the easier it becomes. Of course, "easy" is a relative term, because it really never is truly easy. In spite of that, you will start to find that some of it starts to become more natural. I have written almost 1000 poems, published six volumes of poetry and two collections, and I'm still learning.

There are a couple of different things you can do to help yourself improve. First and foremost, give up on being perfect. Allow yourself to focus on one thing or the other, rhyme or meter, and disregard the other. As you become more consistent with one, you can start to add the other.

Another thing you can do is to look into different kinds of poems and try writing them. Try a haiku instead of a nicely metered ballad. Try some free verse before going after that sonnet. Allow yourself to make mistakes and be sloppy. You may not always like everything you do, but each new poem is another opportunity to learn.

I admire and respect your desire to "get it right", but you can still find beauty in just getting it done!

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