Poetry Revision 101, Lesson Three: Arranging the Words on the Page

One of the surest markers of amateur poetry is a series of centered lines. Though I'm sure a clever poet could find a way of making such an arrangement meaningful (perhaps sarcastically?), most likely such poems are written by people whose only experience of poetry is Hallmark cards.



Before you get all cocky because you abandoned the centered lines format in your early teens, consider this: perfect iambic pentameter and/or perfectly symmetrical (not to mention left-justified) quatrains...