Until tenth grade, I was afraid to write poetry.  Every time I put my pencil to the paper and wrote what I thought was a poem, unforgiving red ink told me otherwise.  The word choice is awkward, it rhymes too much, it rhymes too little, it doesn't "flow" well.  Ninth grade English was the worst.  Nearly every piece of poetry I handed in that year returned to me with a giant, blood-red "C" without an explanation.  No matter what I wrote and revised, I was always wrong.

            My tenth grade English teacher, however, had a different philosophy.  She never said it out loud, but she taught me that there are very few rules when writing poetry.  Very few things are wrong in self-expressive prose, so I wrote freely, and I wrote freely through the rest of the class, beginning to enjoy expressing ideas in written form.  I signed up for a creative writing class, taught by a different teacher. 

            Everything was fine until my first poem was graded.  The only thing this new teacher said about poetry was that a poem had to be at least ten lines; mine was twelve and a half; my ass was covered.  She placed the poem on my desk.  At the bottom of the second page was the word "incomplete."  After class, I brought the poem to her desk and counted the lines out loud.  She looked at the poem again and said, "Oh Megan, it's not a poem.  It's in paragraphs."

            I'm sorry, I didn't realize that poetry could only be organized in either lines or stanzas.  I understand now that the conventional paragraph forces prose to relinquish its poem status.

            I don't care how you write your poetry, but I think that lines are overrated and stanzas are inefficient.  I will structure my poetry how I see fit.  If we can write poetry about whatever we choose, we can write however we choose.  In fact, everything I just said was originally written in paragraphs.  And yes, it is a poem, and no English teacher with a red pen can tell me otherwise.