The BBC Get Writing site has a friendly page called Poetry for Beginners:
Poetry is danced language which means, when you’re writing it or reading it, you mustn’t rush to the end to find out what it means, but every line, every phrase, every word is an end in itself. That’s the most important thing for me about poems. However small you split them, each part is still excited, still a whole.
So the first rule of poetry is: don’t bore yourself.
And the second rule is: don’t bore others? Unfortunately not. But I do agree with the recommendations about writing down the core ideas and then trying to stitch them back together while preserving a kind of tempo or beat. Like a sketch of a song or a set of quick musical notes to be mulled about, worked over, and perhaps refined into a melody later, or not. As Dizzie might have said:
Salt peanuts,
salt peanuts.
To which Buddy could have replied:
Para-diddle, riff,
Flam, para, para,
Para-diddle, riff,
Man, yeah!
