on Writing Forward:

 I don’t know about you, but I wrote poems for years before it ever occurred to me that I might want to publish them. My poetry wasn’t written for an audience or publication. It was personal self-expression. I often used poetry to explore ideas and experiment with language. It seems that this is not uncommon. A lot of poets first come to the craft for the sheer pleasure of composing poetry.

But eventually, many poets decide to try to get published, and there are a variety of ways to do that.

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