When designing a building, certain universal fundamentals must be observed. Engineering principles must be fulfilled in respect of such things as foundations and appropriateness of structural materials. Roofs must keep the rain out; rooms must be tall enough for people to stand upright in; doorways must be at least wide and high enough to pass people and furniture through; thresholds must be at floor level, not half way up a wall; windows must look out on lighted spaces not service ducts, and so on. These are absolutes without which any building will prove useless. But there are also functional requirements that depend on the purpose to which the building is dedicated. The ground plan, internal layout and services required for a hospital will differ from those for a machine shop, office block or condominium.

It's essential to fulfil both these sets of requirements if the building is to serve its purpose at all. But then there are optional preferences – decisions born of taste. So if an overhanging balcony requires the support of columns or brackets, the columns could be plain steel tubes, Corinthian pillars or barley sugar spiralled, and the alternative brackets plain corbels, classical scrolls or gargoyles according to the whim of the commissioner of the building (or at worst, of the architect).

As poets, we're in the same position as architects. Our poem is a public building. It's 'commissioned' by the idea we want to impart. The key requirement is to impart that specific message to maximal effect to our 'visitors' or readers. Our universal fundamentals are vocabulary and established principles of language such as grammar and syntax. The requirements to make the 'building' fit for a specific purpose are for us selection of appropriate description, imagery, analogies, metaphors and mode to maximise the power with which the message is expressed. The optional preferences will include factors such as line and stanza breaks, capitalisation, punctuation and page layout, which may provide a final polish to the work but, as in the case of architecture, only come into play once the fundamentals have been adequately addressed.

So what does this mean in practice? Faced with a commission, the competent architect doesn't guess or Google search about the fundamentals. She knows from experience what kind of foundations suit what soils and what ranges of building materials are appropriate for different climates, localities and use cases. So the inappropriate options don't even cross her mind. At the functional level, her experience of past use cases indicates the nature of the activities the intended end use will entail and consequently the likely requirements. Once again, she will home in spontaneously on the appropriate choices, so all the most important details will automatically be conceptualised. Only then will attention be turned to the trimmings.

You'll note that two kinds of experience have been called upon – experience of fundamentals and experience of functionalities in past practice. In our case as poets, the fundamentals, which are legibility and intelligibility, are achieved by acquisition of a high standard of general literacy,1 and the past practice, which means power of appropriate expression for differing purposes, by deep cumulative immersion in the historical record of poetry.2 The result of gaining both these kinds of experience will be the replacement of 'rules to be followed' by intuitive awareness of the rightness of choices in any given context.

But ignoring either the fundamentals or the functional requirements automatically leads to failure. In the first case, if the architect ignores the technical requirements for foundations her buildings will fall down and if we do a Humpty Dumpty 3 with words, tamper with grammar or jumble syntax excessively, our poems will be obscure or at worst meaningless to our readers. In the second case, if the architect insists, say, on designing all her commissions as skyscrapers regardless of the intended purpose, most of her buildings will be useless and if we refuse to use any form other than, for example, free verse, alliteration or rhyming couplets for all our poems regardless of their message, they'll be shallow and boringly repetitive. In neither case can what the building trade calls features and we might (if unkindly) call tricks 4 applied as an afterthought remedy the situation. The meaning (which is after all the most important element of poetry for the reader) will be weakened by any ambiguity or incongruity between the message and the presentation, so the poem will fail for our public and be forgotten.5

As poets, we should not be in the business of puzzling the reader or striving to be original 6 – our purpose should be to impart significant ideas with supreme clarity and force so that other people can share them to the full. To achieve this, just like the competent architect, we must as a bare minimum take account of proven practicalities at the fundamental and functional levels in order to serve best those who may use our works, and we should not let the features we apply obtrude themselves at the expense of the message.7

 [1] This isn't an 'elitist' ambition reserved for the 'academically inclined'. Any one of us with sufficient interest and commitment can read widely, obtain access to a good etymological dictionary, examine the way ideas are expressed in different kinds of texts, and so on. And we mustn't ignore the vernacular either – exposure to local dialects and cultural idiom can enlarge our vocabularies and understanding of linguistic structures enormously. The only necessities are an enquiring mind, a retentive memory and the willingness to recognise our mistakes and correct them.

 [2] but how we immerse ourselves in poetry is very important. It should be a right brain activity. We shouldn't analyse but dive in without forethought, letting the works flow over us. We're cultivating intuition, not populating a cerebral encyclopaedia.

 [3] 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.' Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chapter 6

 [4] for example, scattering the words of a banal or incomprehensible text over the page in some arbitrary pattern doesn't make the text more interesting or explicit for the general reader, nor does it automatically turn the text into a 'poem'. Only cult members will think it does.

 [5] Just as a public building where room numbers are random and direction signs point down the wrong corridors will confuse visitors, idiosyncratic line breaks, spacing or punctuation that don't obviously relate to the meaning of the text distract the reader from that meaning (forcing the left brain instead to question the anomaly), which weakens transmission of the message. Bluntly, making a poem hard to read is a bad idea, even if the tricks used are thoroughly fashionable.

 [6] Originality doesn't mean doing something nobody else has ever done. That's practically impossible given the million or so years humans have been thinking beings. True originality is coming up with something using your own powers independently, rather than consciously following what others have done. The result is then original even if others have also independently come up with the same thing. But trying to be original always fails, as it attempts to force intuition, which is impossible.

 [7] Victorian domestic decoration was notorious for excess in this respect (see Meyer's A Handbook of Ornament, B.T. Batsford 1894), as is a lot of prize-winning modern poetry – both being outcomes of the dominance of fashion over function.