Looking for some #MondayMotivation? Here's Carrie Etter's Top 3 PoeTips to get you writing!
1. Read outside your "comfort zone" to strengthen your understanding the possibilities of poetry and broaden your appreciation of it. You'll be rewarded with unexpected discoveries and pleasures, as well as an enriched approach to your own writing practice.
2. Subscribe to magazines whose contents inspire and delight you.
3. When you recognise a poem you've written is weak but aren't sure what to change, try changing the form--putting the poem into couplets or prose, for example--as that can often reveal what's necessary in a poem and what's getting in its way.
American expatriate Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011), and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) and Linda Lamus's A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Her first pamphlet of short stories, Hometown, will be published by V. Press in 2016. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath.