Last weekend, I was a speaker at the Lakefly Writers Conference. The whole conference was wonderful.

I really enjoyed the attendees of my session. They ranged from people that have written poems for much longer than me to other speakers (John Dekakis for one) that have never written poems. Truth be told, I am nervous about taking the time to have people write a poem. I feel like a radio DJ with dead air. However, people wrote wonderful things. Attendee Patrick wrote a poem and continued to revise it until he wowed people at the open mic that evening.

People provided great definitions of what poetry is. The most memorable one to me was this: It is the world through the poet’s eyes. How dead-on is that? To me, it tells the need for poetry. We need to be understood and we need to understand others and poetry does that.

Reality is different for everyone. So, we need to expand our horizons by investigating other people’s perspectives!