Challenges to Budding Poets
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

• Invent a new language anyone can understand.

• Climb the Statue of Liberty.

• Reach for the unattainable.

• Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear.

• Dance with wolves and count the stars, including the unseen,

• Be naive, innocent, uncynical, as if you had just landed on Earth (as indeed you
have, as indeed we all have), astonished by what you have fallen upon.

• Write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outerspace, filing dispatches to some
supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for
hot air.

• Read between the lines of human discourse.

• Avoid the provincial, go for the universal,

• Think subjectively, write objectively.

• Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces,

• Remember everything, forget nothing,

• Work on a frontier, if you can find one.

• Go to sea, or work near water, and paddle your own boat.

• Associate with thinking poets. They're hard to flnd.

• Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out,

• Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't pander, especially not to possible
audiences, readers, editors or publishers.

• Come out of your closet. It's dark in there.

• Be committed to something outside yourself.
Be militant about it. . .Or ecstatic.

• To be a poet at 16 is to be 16, to be a poet at 40 is to be a poet. Be both.

Updated 11-2017