This is my goodbye and thank you after almost two years of writing my Times poetry column. I have loved reading the piles of poetry books - thank you to all the publishers who sent them; I have also loved reading your e-mails and letters. You demonstrated how a poem in the column could go off and have another life; comments, discussions and readers' poems abounded. And I have loved writing about the poems, trying to relate them to our hopes and anxieties as human beings in my belief that there is a poem for everyone - even a trucker on the M1 who reads nothing more challenging than his sat-nav. Because to say “I don't like poetry” is like saying “I don't like music”. It's a case of finding something that we like, and there's a lot of choice out there. Having mentioned this in my very first column, I then found a poem called Homesick Truckie on the Algarve Dreams of Bacon by Gaia Holmes.

Several of you wrote in asking for advice about your own poetry. I did manage to answer some of your letters, but by no means all because there were simply not enough hours in the day. So I wanted to collect my thoughts and put them into this article, where they may be of some use to those of you who don't know it all already. If you wondered why I wouldn't criticise your poetry when you sent it in, it's because, as well as time being an issue, I regard negative criticism of living poets (whether they are beginners or not) as akin to shooting someone whose feet are nailed to the floor. No one intends to write a bad poem if they want to be a poet. Nor would I wish to crush a fledgeling creative spark that may produce something much better later, when such a spark is often so difficult to keep alight.

There are steps that we can take to improve, the most important being that we should read our poetry aloud to hear it in a more objective fashion than silently inside our heads. Otherwise, our glaring errors are skated over by our self-conscious psyches. We should also read more of other people's poetry (aloud, of course) - and it should be good poetry, which doesn't necessarily mean fashionable poetry. Although not all published poetry is good poetry, the more we read the more we will get our eye (and ear) in. Trust me, if we read until we're saturated, our opinions will polish up almost unbidden. Whether a particular poem or poet is good or not is only ever someone's opinion and therefore always arbitrary. (I, for one, don't care much for William Blake's poetry. Sorry. But I very much like Dylan Thomas.)

There are some very basic do's and don'ts when writing poetry. Rhyme is nice, but it is entirely up to the poet - in which case lines must scan. Rhyme does, however, help to fix a poem in the memory. Rhythm, on the other hand, is vital and, in reading aloud, a skilled reader can give even free verse a rhythm and lyrical quality that reading silently often fails to do. Metre is important and uncomfortable bumps should not be ironed out by changing the natural order of words, but eliminated to make way for an arrangement that works.

Poets usually write poems when something - however small - is meaningful or important to them, be it an object, an experience or a situation. Even bad poets are thus inspired, despite sometimes failing to convey this; a poem should have a purpose, because meaningless diatribe will always be meaningless diatribe no matter how pretty the words. Poems that rant, however, will lose the audience; no one wants to listen to someone shouting. And we shouldn't describe emotion, but the event that led to the emotion, so that we allow the reader to experience his or her own reaction.

Being dead will not improve one's verse; a bad poet is simply a dead bad poet - look at William McGonagall. Avoid clichés and large amorphous concepts; a good poem should be pared down to its muscle and carry no flab. If a word is taken away or altered then a good poem, a poem that looks effortlessly perfect, should be less than it was, or made other than was intended. That way we know we've done all we can - we can do no more than that.

We must always remember that the reader can't see what was in our mind unless we give them something to go on.

A good poem uses the best words for the job. But we shouldn't just throw them in the air and hope that they will fall in a cohesive heap; they require structure and a sense of responsibility. And we should always be looking for new ways to describe something.

Poems can be friends, or mantras. They can lift our spirits or cause us to nod our heads because we understand: Wendy Cope's Bloody Men (Serious Concerns, Faber & Faber), for instance, may strike a chord for some of us:

Bloody men are like bloody buses

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches

your stop

Two or three others appear.

Poems can be intellectual to the point that many of us would be alienated (and I could cite The Emperor's New Clothes), or so simple and easily understood that some may consider them rather basic (but they are often the best). Poetry is as varied as we are; our differences simply mean that we haven't been cloned.

To end, I offer two ways of considering poetry: my own and one by Billy Collins, in which he describes the over-zealous analysis of a poem, which might finish it off altogether.

About a poem by Frieda Hughes

There's a poet in there somewhere.

Did you skim over the words

Expecting the message to leap out and grab you?

You'll miss him. He'll be

Tucked under the iambic pentameter,

Its five feet cornering

The poet's meaning.

Don't expect him all laid out

Like a diagram with arrows pointing,

He might have hidden himself in allegory.

Read him twice, aloud,

Hear the way he speaks, be judicial

Instead of searching for the easy way out

And skimming, interested

Only in the superficial

One-note shout.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

(Being Alive, Bloodaxe, and The Apple

that Astonished Paris, University of Arkansas Press)

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

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