1) Write poetry
My father loved football. When football season started I use to have to lay on the floor in front of the couch to see what he looked like standing up. Since all my father seemed to like was football I decided in the sixth grade to play football. I joined a YMCA team, my father proudly bought me the needed equipment, and I spent several days imagining myself playing football.
I could actually see myself crashing through a line of huge lummoxes, drenched in rain, my jersey stained by mud and blood. The actual process of practice was miserable, and at the first game I was hurt. I dropped out.
My point is that imagining something can be thrilling and fun, but it is not the same thing as doing what was imagined. I wasn't a football player when I imagined myself punching through a line. I wasn't a football player when I put on the uniform. I wasn't a football player.
To be a poet you have to write poetry. You don't have to be good. You don't have to be recognized. You don't have to have readers at a particular point in time (eventually even posthumously, you need readers), the one and only thing you need to be a poet is to write poetry.
2) Polish your work.
Learn to revise. If you don't revise, but you do write, you are still a poet, but you are not as good a poet as the potential that exists within you.
I remember an interview with James Dickey that had first gotten interested in poetry and writing when he started writing letters to girls he was wooing. I identified with this statement from Mr. Dickey, because I too got really excited about writing when I had my first audiences, potential girlfriends.
Yes, writing poetry and love letters may be a silly path to poetry, but it taught me two thing: (1) when I write I want my reader to understand me, and (2) I want the reader to feel the feelings I want them to feel. This is the crux of revision. You change what you have written until you are satisfied that it will be understood the way you want it understood and the reader will react emotionally the way you want them to react.
3. Publish your work:
How?
a) Send stuff out. The problem with sending your stuff out is that you get it back with little slips of paper explaining that they have rejected your carefully crafted literary gem. William Stafford once explained why rejection letters didn't bother him. Mr. Stafford said he send so many poems out, and kept them out, that he grew use to the rejection slips, and always had the hope that one would find a publisher, because even when he got rejected he knew he still had a couple of dozen other works floating around that might work. There is a statistical aspect to sending your work out. First, if you don't send your stuff out you have a zero chance of getting anything published. Second, if you send enough stuff out it is almost certain that eventually you will find a publisher.
When I took earth science I learned that little drops of water have eventually carved through rock, brought droplet friends along and made the little grove wider, and, eventually, given enough time, the grove carved by drops of water became the Grand Canyon.
b) Join a local poetry writing group where work is shared. If you read your stuff out loud before a group of any size, that is a form of publishing. Go to the Public Library and ask if such a group already exists. If not, ask to put up a poster and have interested parties call you. If you get three interested parties then meet at the library, each person should share a work, give friendly feedback, and then talk about promoting the group.
Eventually the size of the group may be large enough to justify the library providing you the reading room once a month.
c) Join an online poetry sharing group like a Yuku community http://www.yuku.com/. It is free, to join, and contains many different groups with discussion boards on a variety of subjects. Pick a poetry discussion board, join, and then you have a built in group to bounce drafts off of. One thing they ask is to comment on the work of at least three other people for each work of your own that is posted.
Members can create up to five profiles, send private messages and use "kudos" to give credit to other members or highlight a post. Members can also customize their profiles with one of the designer skins or create their own custom look with the WYSIWYG tool.
d) Publish a Chapbook. A chapbook is a low cost way to produce a very short collection of your poems, and it can actually be made by the poet using a computer and going to a copy center.
Find out more about how you can create your on chapbook for almost no money. Search wrap the word chapbook and read all about it.
4) Repeat. To be a poet is to be a poet all the time. Almost every adult has written a poem at least once. Millions have written poems at times of intense emotion both good ones (such as falling in love) to bad ones (like losing a loved one.) If you wrote poems back when you were a suffering teenager, then that's great. There is no rule that says you have to write poetry you whole life. I gave my wife insulin shots when she was too ill to take care of it herself. It didn't make me a healthcare practitioner of any kind, but it was still great that I could do that when I needed to do that. Write when you want to. But this article is about advice to a wantabee poet. If you wantabee a poet you need to do what a poet does, and repeat those things over and over again, and if you do, you are a poet. Famous? Maybe not. But fame is not as important as we usually think.
People talk about risking not being read in a hundred years, and that seems ridiculous to me, like house dogs fretting whether or not anyone's going to remember their greatest late night howls a hundred years from now. ~Tony Tost
If you follow this advice will you be a poet? Yes, absolutely, and most definitely.
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