As part of my graduate program I have to take a seminar on Non Fiction. Me, the fiction writer. It’s a week long class and today was the first day. Our first assignment was to write a letter to someone we’ve been meaning to contact. I opted to write a letter to a friend of mine who passed away recently. I blogged about her here. Not the funnest of letters to write, let me tell you.
We then moved on to writing a poem about where we ‘Are From.’ A poem? Really? This just keeps getting worse! But everyone else was plugging away, so I had to as well.
Here’s one stanza came up with that doesn’t make me want to punch myself: bearing in mind I am neither a poet or a non-fiction writer.
I am from gussied-up trailer-trash
second-hand smoke
third-hand clothes
and
first-hand knowledge.
Danielle Bannister, Author 
If you have something worthwhile to say, how you say it, be it fiction, non-fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, etc…is really a matter of form and structure, which is merely a matter of learning how. That poem is really good. It says more in those five lines than most people can express in pages and pages…so I guess you are a poet.
A poet who don’t know it!