Loose thread on craft in poems:
1. Your intentions are just another literary device that is open to revision. Perhaps no revision can happen if those aren't on the table. No matter how enamored w/ marble the sculptor is, clay may be the medium for the piece. This isn't compromise

2. You don't need to have a perfect poetics or a perfect politic to explore a topic, same as you don't need to perfectly know God exists in order to pray.

3. Do whatever you need to in a poem to keep yourself curious. Curiosity is a poem's enduring power. I am, of course, not sure of this. But I wonder.

4. In nearly every other artistic discipline, imitation is not only valued, but insisted on. Imitate poems you enjoy. Imitate poems you don't enjoy. You are always going to sound like yourself. You have many selves.

5. Poets, myself included, are notoriously terrible with advice about capital P poetry. We are far better with advice about specific poems, specific moments in poems. Perhaps this is b/c many poems are built from the ground up; from an sharp image, a fragment of music, a word.

6. I find, perhaps I am not alone in this, debates about taxonomy to be boring. Not unimportant, just boring. It matters little to me what we do or do not classify as a poem.
Knowing for sure what to label a piece has never helped me get to the next line or the next sentence.

7. It's okay to write a decent poem. Just a pretty good one. Not every poem need be a masterpiece. Poems, like ourselves, desire freedom. Forgive them their mistakes.

Resist the easy epiphany, the too clean ending, the formulation that drains mystery from the world, but doesn't provide any lasting clarity. Suggesting easy answers to a complicated world can be an artistic dead-end. I don't mean simple syntax, but rather vapid insight.

9. You aren't locked in a dialectic with your poem draft. You aren't Jacob wrestling with the angel for a name. You are the dream, the vision, the endless ladder.

10. Don't treat "inspiration" as if it were money in a capitalist system. Inspiration is the air. Your job in the poem is to breathe, and try to clear the phlegm that restricts breathing.

If you wait for inspiration you will pass out.

11. Most importantly, ignore anything in this thread that doesn't work for you. Poet as one voice in the chorus > Poet as sage.