ABSTRACT
The quote from Matthew Sweeney and Robert Frost that opens this chapter – ‘Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen’ – can be adopted as a very useful approach to writing poetry. It can encourage us to aim for something new and ‘fresh’ when creating a poem, not only ‘fresh’ in terms of what we are writing about, for example a new way of thinking about a subject, but also ‘fresh’ in terms of how the poem is expressed – in terms of the language and the imagery that we use. Colin Macfarlane expresses very much the same thing when he says that in poetry ‘a good description gives a new way of seeing’.
