I'm writing these notes on writing poetry in the year 2003. At this stage I'm in my forties, and I've been writing poetry for most of my life. My first published work was poetry, and it was poetry, initially, which got most of my creative attention.
         Seven years ago, if you'd asked me whether the writing of poetry could be taught, I would have answered "No."
         But for the last seven years I've been making my living by teaching English to people who are not native speakers of the language. By doing this, I've heightened my own awareness of the English language, and I've had to develop techniques to make my students more aware of what's going on in the average English sentence.
         My students have also taught me things. For example, the word "rubbish" came up in a lesson at a conversation school, some five years ago.
         "Rubbish," said my female student, savoring the word. "That's a beautiful word."
        "Beautiful?"
         "Yes. Like ... like, rabbit."
         And she was right. "Rubbish" is an intrinsically beautiful word, much more beautiful than the comparatively harsh "garbage." But I would never have arrived at that insight unassisted.
        What follows, now, is a kind of introductory sensitivity-raising exercise. Very brief - I'm writing on the train between a couple of English classes.
        Today I was fooling around with some notes for a short poem about getting up in the morning. And I came up with:-

        I'm not claiming that this is great art, but, even so, a certain sensitivity to language is required to write it, and the point of this piece is that the key to writing poetry is the development of that sensitivity. And that one way to do this is by analyzing language - not necessarily poetry - from as many different angles as possible.