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.   01-2025

Updated 11-2017