For a lot of people the desire to write poetry comes naturally, perhaps from a desire to express painful feelings or capture great experiences. However what is less natural is the ability to write good poetry without learning any of the craft.

My dad used to have a toolbox with 2 tools in it, a big hammer and a flat head screwdriver. He reckoned you could do most things with those 2 tools, from screwing and unscrewing things to using the screwdriver as a makeshift chisel. Suffice to say his DIY projects were always at best rather rough.

It is the same with poetry we all start with a basic toolkit, the words life has provided us with and a means to record those words.We can add to those tools by learning different techniques and slowly build up our toolkit, by practice we can learn when to use each tool and how to get the best results from it. Some tools are pretty multipurpose such as metaphor, assonance or tone; others are more specialised like meter, rhyme or forms.