[Julie Steiner]

Ah. I get the quotation marks and dibs now. A bit like the copyright notices that many new poets slap at the bottom of their work. It may reassure you to know that written works enjoy copyright protection without such declarations.

Since the quoted portions seem to be lines from a poem, I would give one more piece of advice.

Personally, I would be more interested in a poem that I eventually figured out was about the loss of writing of some sort--maybe of poems, maybe of love letters, and maybe even just using the writing as a symbol for a lost relationship--than in a poem that flatly told me that it was about lost poems. The openness to possible interpretations is what makes poetry poetry, for me.

If you want your writing to convey precisely what you mean to say, and nothing else, prose seems more suited to that.

If you want your writing to present readers with clues that they are then free to draw their own conclusions from, and free to feel their own feelings about, that's a poem.

Best regards,
Julie