“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out “Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?" Ron Koertge Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house or apartment. Go out into the world. It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best, with pages the color of weak tea and on the front a kitten or a space ship. Avoid any enclosed space where more than three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks across the muffled tennis courts. Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write. And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle where a child a year or two old is playing as his mother browses the ranks of the dead. Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf. The title, the author's name, the brooding photo on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher it gets, the wider he grins. You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh." Then start again.

Introduction to Poetry Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Like a bird on the wire,

like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.

Like a worm on a hook,

Like a knight in some old fashioned book

I have saved all my ribbons for thee.

If I , if I have been unkind, I hope that you can just let it go by.

If I , if I have been untrue, I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,

Like a beast with his horn

I have torn everyone who reached out to me.

But I swear by this song

And by all that I have done wrong

I will make it all up to thee.

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, he said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

Like a bird on the wire,

like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.

Rhythm: The way the emphasized and non-emphasized syllables work to from a beat. Poems, like this one, where the rhythm is consistent from line to line, stanza to stanza, are said to be written in meter.

Rhyme: A repeated sound in the final stressed syllable of two or more lines, or within lines themselves. Rhyme is how we as children first learn that letter combinations have consistent sounds, and they are thus a source of pleasure..

Alliteration and Assonance: Alliteration is a similarity of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginning of words. Assonance is the similarity of vowel sounds within words close together.

Juxtapostion: The creative contrast of two images or ideas in a way that makes each stronger.

Connotation: The deeper meanings, associations or evocations of a word.