Built of Rag and Bone

The W.O.O.F. Contest (Writers Offering Our Finest) is a weekly contest held by PlotDog Press. Submissions can be anything from original creative writing to photos and artwork about writing, so long as it’s original work, has to do with creative writing, and was posted on your blog within 14 days of the deadline for submissions. The participants then vote for that week’s "Top Picks." The poem I entered in the contest for April 10th made the list of top picks!

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So I’ve been reading a lot of poetry online recently, some of it by "poets," some just by bloggers who wrote a poem. Some of it is actually quite good (interestingly, whether the person considers themselves a poet or not gives no indication of the poem’s merit.) I noticed however, that the vast majority is not good, some of it actually verges on very, very bad.
This is mainly due to some common blunders of the novice poet and some inadvertent violations of what Timothy Liu called, "no-nos." In this, the first installment of what I hope will be an on-going series, "Things Every Poet Should Know," I’ll be going over some of the most common and most harmful no-nos poets commit. I hope some of you find it helpful, or at the very least, vindicating.

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