National poetry day took place last week. I never used to regard myself as a poet. I felt my efforts at traditional verse with rhyme and metre came out as contrived or clichéd, and doubted my free verse was much better. Since then, I've been lucky enough to enjoy some success, but even when I thought the results were poor, the process of writing poetry was invaluable.
Distilling my thoughts and ideas into exactly the right words required a balance of focus and freedom that shut out any trivi...
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