What poets do may not seem to have much to do with other kinds of writing. It can seem arcane and abstruse, all those rules or lack of rules and blank space and gnomic pronouncements.

Of course, that’s all nonsense. Like anything else, poetry is just the act of putting one word after another until you have something.

Which is why Robert Frost knew what he was talking about. In the preface to a 1939 Collected Poems edition, he gave the following advice:

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader…

Be engaged in whatever you are writing. If you are just skipping along the surface, the reader can tell.