• Poems you can recite in a noisy restaurant or declaim over drinks
• Poems you can use
• Poems that stick in your head
• Poems that are technically flawless

The manifesto explained

Why: poetry is dying because people have insisted on writing boring "élitist" poems (like the word "grass" on an otherwise bare page), thrown poetic technique to the winds, taken pride in the fact that no-one wants to read it (that is, buy it), celebrated meaningless obscurity, kept it quiet small and introspective to the point of tedium, revered the banal and small above the exciting and great, and declared real subject matter and intense feelings unfashionable along with any recognisable poetic technique. The result is not even Guardian readers read the Guardian's Saturday poem, not even other poets read contemporary poetry, poetry gets a bad rep, payments are minute, and the poems themselves range from dull to nauseating. I am angry because I love poetry.

Poems you can recite in a noisy restaurant or declaim over drinks: poetry that can only survive when read in a special voice, with reverence, or with misty-eyed intent, is weak poetry. Toughen it up for the real world and it might actually get out the poetry group and back into the real world.

Poems you can use: most people flip through a poetry book the way they listen to music - looking for something to match their feelings, express their thoughts, or entertain them, and ninety-nine percent of the time because they're in love.

Poems that stick in your head: rhyme and rhythm are how we memorise poetry; subjects that speak to us are why we memorise it.

Poems that are technically flawless: no excuses - poets have managed for hundreds of years to say what they mean, without compromise, within the constraints of verse. For the how-to, see the vitriolic Rules below.

The rules

A special tone isn't a poem: if it doesn't stand up for itself without being read in a hallowed voice, stuff it.

Say something about something: the perfection of a dewdrop on a blade of grass may make your day, but unless you add something meatier it won't make a poem - or at least not one anyone'll care to read much. If you don't care about your poems being read, carry on. If you care, give it some oomph. Poetry that's about nothing at all seems highly prized in the tiny inbred world of competitions and is one of the main reasons why poetry's dying. No-one's interested - not even other poets!

Don't make the reader do your work: Inviting the reader to create their own meaning from your juxtapositions and fragments isn't writing a poem. That doesn't mean you have to sew everything up and spell it all out - but use your own creativity, don't just give other people opportunities to be creative.

Proper rhymes: different doesn't rhyme with sent anymore than through rhymes with rough. A rhyme includes the final strong vowel sound and the rest of the word - eg. for serendipitous you need a rhyme for -ipitous, not just -ous.

Natural speech rhythms: / means strong syllable; - means weak syllable. The metre for beautiful is /-- not /-/. Say everything as you would in natural speech, no matter what you want the rhythm to be. An English textbook for foreigners on English stress patterns may help. Generally, content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are stressed and grammar words (pronouns, auxiliaries, prepositions) aren't.

No cheap tricks to fix the rhythm: cheap tricks include...

• avoiding contractions like "don't" where it's natural to use them (eg. I do not know)
• treating mid-strength syllables as strong syllables (eg. treating liability as /-/-- instead of --/--)
• pointless inversions (eg. when I your face saw) - this is a hanging offence
• throwing "did" or "do" in front of the verb unnecessarily (eg. I do despair) - another hanging offence
• using "filler words" to get some weak stress between two stressed words - eg. quite, just, now, and, so,

No poetic words: throw diaphanous to the winds, unless you have a damn good reason for using it. People usually wake up rather than awakening, though you might get away with the latter; we say in the middle of or among not amidst; and so on. 'Tis is a hanging offence. Eschew any word that's only used in poetry.

Raise your game: get it right then move on - not away from all your technique, but start to learn what it can do. Iambic metre, for instance, is very rare in English (sonnets were an Italian invention, it suits their language not ours). Its unnatural heavy pace, though, is good for intoning something. A final stanza line that is shorter brings you up unexpectedly and can show shock or pain. A rhyming couplet suggests completion and a final conclusion. An abab rhyme pattern helps the poem flow; an abba rhyme pattern makes each stanza a complete entity.