"A poem is like a bowl of roses," said Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "It should never have to be explained."

Keep a poem in your pocket?  All right, fine.  But keep a pocket in your poem, and let the pocket have a hole in it, a Swiss Army knife, blue taffeta fringe, sixaggies, a hawk feather or a lottery ticket. Poetry, like life, is in the details.

A great metaphor makes the original image blush.

Hearing at least one poem should be part of every child’s every day experience.

A great poet, as Clive James said of Emily Dickinson, is someone “who could enamel the inside of a raindrop.”

In writing children’s verse, nothing succeeds like failure: Fail as much and as often as you can. Embrace failure. How else to get it right? 

Performance poetry is usually long on performance and short on poetry.

Bad poets are often great performers: Image to them is everything, words mean nothing.

What is “bad poetry”? The phrase is meaningless. Bad poetry isn’t poetry at all.

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