Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s – all flew by without a hello from me. My head was down and I was neck-deep in living—loving family— playing with granddaughters—writing and being accepted in a creative writing program—cooking—cleaning—etc—etc.

I’m still here working on poems and now I’ve added critical analysis, which I’m practicing. The idea is I annotate poems to learn and scrutinize a poem deeply to be able to improve my craft of writing poems. So I’ve been writing and reading critically which is very time-consuming and very stimulating.

This snowy and frigid month of February take out a pen and look closely at a favorite poem. See the line breaks, the verse lengths, the punctuation, the theme, the coherence, the images, the setting and then write a poem based on inspiration from that poem you analyzed.