Below you will find my list of ten poets that everybody must know. They are not listed in any particular order, but they are all must reads.

All of the poets below must be thoroughly researched and digested by poets of all types. Start with Google and go from there.

Charles Bukowski

Robert Frost

Langston Hughes

Allen Ginsberg

W.B. Yeats

Emily Dickinson

Shel Silverstein

Nikki Giovanni

Wilfred Owen

Saul Williams

It is my sincere attempt to begin a new chapter in the writing career of Middlepoet. I am planning on a return to poetry. Although, I never really left. Somewhere along the way in my writing career, I fear that at times I have forgotten to keep the writing basic, in short to be poetic.

As a writer I have at times gotten away from what poetry should be, simplistic. Prose has made brief appearances in my poems, which although sometimes not a bad thing, can be a bit of a distraction. As a result, I have had to go back to the basics. I have been reading Shel Silverstein to refamiliarize myself with the beauty of the simple thought, the simple story.

I have found a great sense of reward in my attempt to return to metaphors and slant rhymes. Part of my poetic rebirth is my new found love for micro fiction. Essentially many of the “poems” I was writing were in fact works of micro fiction. I thoroughly enjoy the concept of telling a story in just a few hundred words, as is the case with micro fiction in prose and with poetry in verse, but it is important for me artistically to maintain a distance between the two.

Perhaps, this moment in my journey as a writer is an epiphany, perhaps the early stages of a manifesto. Perhaps this is nothing more than a continualization of a writer who has figured something out that is not such a mystery in the first place.