How to find your voice as a poet

This is another requested lecture. Uh this one specifically for the vers poets. The poets who are workshopping their poems together and have really created this amazing community on vers uh in which they they study the craft of writing and experimentation together. And it's one of the beautiful and surprising things that happened after we we moved to this platform.

Uh it just sort of organically happened. And so I thought that this lecture in some way would would help promote that in the work that they're doing. And what they were really interested in was how do you find your voice as a poet? And there is a this is the conundrum that uh faces new poets.

It's almost a paradox that every great poet has learned from the poets of the past. Yet every great poet has a voice that's distinct from those voices who came before. How does that work? And this is the question that the lecture tonight will answer for the poets on verse and for you all as well for everyone.

We're going to talk about how to find your voice as a poet. Um, every every poet has belonged to some tradition and furthered that tradition. How do you identify your tradition? And once you found it, how do you contribute something new to it?

How do you find new ways to say old truths that every poet learns to sing of? I can't give you a checklist or a map in this lecture because that's not the way the paths work. because the the path that every poet took to get to where they are uh all these paths are different from each other. They were all following a certain star as it were.

Uh so instead of giving a map uh this lecture is going to bring together some voices of poets who will help set you on the right course to to find your own course to give you the freedom to choose uh in the same way that other poets came before have chosen. And from the classical poets and uh rhetorics all the way to our present day MFA programs, there seems to be about a three to four stage process. And sometimes these stages overlap, but the four stages are imitation, emulation, inspir excuse me, innovation and then inspiration. So, imitation, emulation, innovation, inspiration, and it's ...