By not being bound by conventional word order, verbal conjugations or clause analysis, and translating 'weed-choked', 'flowers' and ' grass' into 'riotous', 'floreate' and 'verdure', the enthusiastic club member can have material printed in the local gardening magazine that looks and sounds remarkably like what is expected to pass as poetry in literary publications. The considerable bulk of written matter that is presented as 'poetry' is at best amusing verse and at worst is nothing more than compostable verbal waste. If such a thing as a poem is to be created, then it will have most or all of the properties of any form of art... craftsmanship, simplification, symbolism, and imaginative diversity.

Poetry is an art form whereby the aspiration of communicating experiences and profound existential insights, is striven towards with optimized language. In its most ambitious form, it is the verbal expression of a cross-fertilization and complexification of conceptual images, which attempts to enhance the imagination and provide a reality perspective which is unique, and not predictable from the separate and individual images. Unanticipated associations of words, meticulously sustained aural rhythms, and carefully constructed echoes and resonances, all have the power to surprise and disturb. The skill of the poet is to associate concepts that disturb comfortable expectations or illuminate with unimagined perspectives.

Poetry has its origins in the rubbish of a dreamlike chaos, where ideas and emotions seed word sequence crystals, which are unconstrained by grammar, convention or logic. Faceted and polished, the set of linguistic associations is displayed or performed in an attempt to illuminate the mind of the reader or achieve an empathy with ears of the listener. The merit or otherwise of a poem resides in its capacity to induce novel and resonant images from diverse perspectives in the minds of a wide spectrum of awarenesses.

Much of what is promulgated as poetry is more or less just word-play with variations on line length. Short segmented lengths of prose-like language is partitioned up by excessive and psychotic use of the carriage return. Lines of ordinary word sequences are chopped up with the ¶ symbol well before whatever might be taken for a sentence has ever had the opportunity of reach the designated edge of the page. Ordinary language, sliced and layered on a page is not thereby poetic... no matter how theatrically or emotively it might be delivered.

                  verbal stacks of sawmill words¶
                  of squarecut metered treated lengths¶
                  chosen for their knot-free lack of warp¶
                  and ends which have the grain the same¶
                  stacked up piles of word-lines ending rhymed or otherwise¶
                  are no more poetic¶
                  than stacked logs¶
                  trimmed and debarked¶
                  are sculptural¶

Neither does ordinary language, spoken with quasi ecclesiastical reverberations, thereby acquire the status of poetry. The attempt to engender an air of profound significance, by delivering juxtapositions of the mundane in a monotonic portentous manner several semitones above that of natural speech...is pretension...not poetry.