Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook - and experiential sharing

Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook is a dead useful teacher on the techniques and technicalities of poetry (writing). She mentions "a poem's great weight of glittering pulls it down", "I like to say I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. This is a useful notion, especially during revision. It reminds me, forcefully, that everything necessary must be on the page....  like a traveller in an uncertain land, it needs to carry all that it must have to sustain its own life - and not a lot of extra weight either.",

But most of all:
"It is also good to remember that, now and then, it is simply best to throw a poem away. Some things are just unfixable".

So true for life as well! We all have tried to pen a poem some point or other in our lives when we were down or needed comfort. A minority of us progressed to make poetry-penning part of our lives. Yet an even smaller percentage pursues it formally in University - Literature.

How easy to just write and let go. After reading Oliver's work, may I just say I'm just beginning to see light on what true poetry writing is? It is a never-ending journey. I'm quite unnerved by the hard work one must put in in order to comprehend things more. Experience and imagination combine threads to weave a poem that holds its own world in self-sufficiency. Through the art of poetry, I think I'm just beginning to appreciate that excessive glitter really weighs one down..

The hallmark of a good poem is its ability to transfer its experience, without attachment to the poet's life. You do not get to know the poet through the poem (usually). Poems are living creatures, magnificient as unicorns, nostalgic as a rainsoaked toy in the gutter, meant for us to love.