The Twelve Steps of Poetry

1. We admitted we were powerless over poetry — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.Came to believe that a Poetry Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to poetry as we understood it.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our poems.
5. Admitted to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our poetry.
6. Were entirely ready to remove all the shortcomings in our poems.
7. Humbly asked the Poetry Power to help us remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed with our poems, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Wrote new poems for such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory of our poems, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through stanza, breath, line, and ear to improve our conscious contact with poetry, praying only for knowledge of Poetry’s will for us, and the poems to carry that out.
12. Having had a poetic awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other poets, and to practice these principles in all our poems.


Amen.

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