Built of Rag and Bone

So I’ve been reading a lot of poetry online recently, some of it by "poets," some just by bloggers who wrote a poem. Some of it is actually quite good (interestingly, whether the person considers themselves a poet or not gives no indication of the poem’s merit.) I noticed however, that the vast majority is not good, some of it actually verges on very, very bad.
This is mainly due to some common blunders of the novice poet and some inadvertent violations of what Timothy Liu called, "no-nos." In this, the first installment of what I hope will be an on-going series, "Things Every Poet Should Know," I’ll be going over some of the most common and most harmful no-nos poets commit. I hope some of you find it helpful, or at the very least, vindicating.

[DISCLAIMER: I may phrase things as "rules" or things to "never do," but it's important to remember that poetry rules are meant to be broken, as long as there's a reason for it and it serves the poem in a way that following the rules could or would not. More on that in a later installment.]

The No-Nos

1. The No-No Words __

These are words which will turn almost every reader of poetry off. They typically serve to cheapen the poem, add an unpleasant bit of melodrama, and/or make the poet seem unimaginative.

• Blood, bleed, bleeding
  
• Cry, crying, (and to a lesser extent, weeping, sobbing )
• Tear, tears, or any common variation on water dripping from one’s eye in sorrow. This includes things like, "A single glass bead rolled down her cheek…"
• Rain (Only a no-no when combined with any of the first three. Then it’s just awful .)
• Pain , anguish, torment (This mostly applies to expressions of emotional pain, but be wary whenever using these words.)
• Soul, spirit
  
• Heart (Please, don’t talk about your heart belonging to another, or capturing, breaking, or stealing your heart. Just don’t.)
• Love (This one is often unavoidable, but is a definite buzzword. Be careful not to sound trite.)
• Knife, razor, stab, stabbing (These are not always no-nos. Use your judgment; does it seem a tad melodramatic? Cut it and don’t look back.)

That’s all I have right now for big no-no words. There are more, I’m sure, and many more that are very tricky to use without making it a no-no, such as summer, breeze, angel, eyes, clouds, kiss, and beauty . If you think of any I’ve left off, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

2. Letting your word processor auto-capitalize each line __

It’s true that it was traditionally considered "correct" to capitalize the first letter of every line in a poem, and it’s true that many excellent poems are formatted this way, but most of them were written by canonized dead guys when traditional forms dominated poetry. This is not the case in contemporary poetry; free verse is by far the most common type of poem today and capitalizing each line makes the poem feel stiff, clunky, and old-fashioned. It separates the lines in a way that hampers the interplay between line breaks and sentences—enjambment loses its effect and the potential for intricate rhythms is severely diminished.

The other reason auto-capitalization is an issue mainly applies to student work, but anyone using a word processor like Microsoft Word can fall victim: It makes you look lazy. Every time I see a free-verse poem with the first letters capitalized, I think, "Did they mean to do that or are they just too lazy to change their AutoCorrect settings?" That was a very common frustration in college workshops, and an easy one to fix. So fix it.

3. Changing  form or structure in the middle of a poem __

Now before you freak out and say I have no idea what I’m talking about, that poetry is meant to be free-spirited, blah, blah, blah… Let me first say that this is a big one for the disclaimer; there are many times when changing form or structure halfway through a poem can be great—you can use it to separate sections, illustrate a shift in the poem, or otherwise enhance the poem by varying the form. What I’m talking about is changing the form or structural elements carelessly and without reason.

Say you start a poem with no punctuation or capitalization. That’s great! If that’s what’s best for the poem, more power to you. But say you get halfway through and start using punctuation… The reader starts questioning why it’s missing from the first half and why you started using it all of a sudden. You damn well better have a good reason for the switch, or your poem will look lazy and careless. You don’t want people to be distracted by wondering whether you made a mistake.

A good rule of thumb is to default to using proper punctuation and only vary it when necessary; when unconventional punctuation would serve the poem in a way that normal punctuation can’t .  Another safe rule is to either use proper punctuation and capitalization, or none at all. Variations on this include only capitalizing the first letter of each stanza, only using periods and omitting other punctuation, or any other selective use of capitalization/punctuation. As long as it serves the poem and stays consistent, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Same goes for form . Say you write a poem that has the following structure: tercet, tercet, tercet, quatrain, tercet, tercet. There better be a damn good reason that one stanza has four lines instead of three, because it’s going to stick out like an infected thumb—especially the fourth line. It will not only stick out when you look at the poem on the page, but when you read it as well; the rhythm will do a sort of stutter on the fourth line of the quatrain, distracting the reader and slowing the pace of the poem. You’d better want that much focus on that line, or the rest of the poem will suffer.

I’m not saying every poem has to have a clear and even structure, but I am saying that if it looks like you’re using a certain form and then you break it, people will notice. The longer your form is consistent, the more jarring it will be if you change it. The slight exception to this is in the last stanza; many traditional forms have a different number of lines in the last stanza: the villanelle has a quatrain after five tercets, the sestina has six sestets followed by a tercet, et cetera. Be careful though, varying structure at the end of a poem can lead you into the next no-no on the list:

4. Ending the poem with a "home run"__

I had a bad habit of violating this no-no, and still catch myself doing it from time to time—it’s a hard one to resist. Picture this:
You’ve just spent all night working on a poem and all you have to do is end it. Then it hits you—the perfect couplet to end the poem! It fits the meter, it’s reasonably clever, and it ties the poem together flawlessly, summing up the sentiment you worked on all night in two tidy lines (or one, or a few, whatever)… That’s great, right?
Wrong! You are not Homer and this is not an epic! (Unless it is, in which case, swing away.)

A home run is any heavy-handed, grandiose, pretentious, or altogether-too-neat-and-tidy lineor lines at the end of a poem. (It’s also called a "punchline," though punchlines can be good or bad. "Home run" generally implies you were swinging for a home run, but missed. When you’re swinging that hard, you look awful silly if you don’t crack it outta the park.  Don’t feel bad, though; most people can’t hit at all.

The problem with the home run is that if the poet doesn’t pull it off, it can ruin the whole poem by leaving a bad taste in the reader’s mouth, overshadowing anything good that might have come before. It will make you groan and resent the poet for letting you follow him all the way through the labyrinth just to find a crap sandwich at the end. Equally infuriating as the over-reaching home run is a subset of the home run:

The Bow. This refers to an ending line that wraps the poem up in a neat little package, tying off loose ends and driving the point home with a particularly condescending sledgehammer. This insults the reader’s intelligence and denies him the pleasure of uncovering the poem’s meaning. By handing him the message after he’s put in the effort to find it for himself, you cheat him out of the payoff. Trust him to find it. If he can’t, then either you didn’t give him enough to go on, or he’s too dense. But making that call is a discussion for a later day.

You don’t want to leave things completely unclear, with the reader lost and directionless at the end of the poem; but, you don’t want to just plunk him down at the end of the maze and hand him the cheese, either; instead, you want to give him just enough that he can find his own way there. It might even be a route that you hadn’t considered.

Loose ends are what you ponder after the poem, they’re what give you a sense of having read something worth your while. You need enough ambiguity to make the discovery satisfying, but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed and gives up. One thing that can really stick a nasty old bow on an ending is rhyme. Beware…

5. Rhyming__

This is yet another it’s-okay-sometimes no-no. Personally, I hate rhyming in contemporary poetry… usually. But Alex, you say. You’ve written several poems that rhyme. Do you hate your own poems?
Well, yes, sometimes I do. But the poems I’ve posted rhyme do so for a reason—"Mama Had a Baby and the Head Popped Off " emulates the tone of a nursery rhyme, and Found Poem: Spam Villanelle is a villanelle and the form dictates the rhyme scheme. In general though, if the rhyme does not have an explicit purpose like these, it will come off as sing-songy and childish. These poems are boring and predictable, yet extremely common for the simple fact that they "sound like poetry." When most people set out to write a poem, they will automatically start writing in an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme and something close to pentameter. This is not the only kind of poetry out there! It has been so beaten to death that it puts the poem at an automatic disadvantage. Don’t cheat your poems. Be an equal-opportunity poet.

Rhyme can be useful though, especially internal rhyme (rhyme between two words, at least one of which does not end a line), as a way to control rhythm and add emphasis. Just be careful you don’t over do it, and DO NOT let an instinctive need to rhyme change the content of your poem. Resist! Eventually you’ll wonder why you ever wanted to rhyme in the first place.

6. The last no-no is a big one: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY __

This is a real problem for most novice poets. They take themselves too seriously, writing huge sweeping poems about the wretched abyss that is their soul or the legendary love they’ve lost. Well here’s the awful truth: No one cares about your lost love, they only care about their lost love.

When you write a poem, the speaker is not you. Even if it is you, it’s not you . It’s the speaker. The speaker is universal, he or she is whoever they need to be for that poem. If you’re writing a poem about your mother, for instance, the poem is not about your mother, it’s about a mother—the speaker’s mother. Keep this in mind as you write (and read) poetry, it’s extremely important.

If that poem about your mother just isn’t quite working, screw it up! Make it bizarre, or disturbing, or funny: Your mom wasn’t an alcoholic baby seal-clubber? So what? The speaker’s might have been, and your poem just got a little more interesting.

Write the poem, not your personal story. This will help you understand the reader’s perspective and shed some light on certain things, such as why it made no sense to them that mooing at your sister terrified her. You remember when she was two and got trampled on grandpa’s ranch, but they don’t. If you’re writing the poem and not yourself,  you will intuitively know when you need those details in there, instead of getting wrapped up in your own perspective.

Finally, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nicole Cooley: She said that her poetry really took off when she realized, "No one gets hurt if I write a bad poem."

Write bad poems, let people read them, take their critiques seriously but not personally. You’ll need to grow a thick skin, ’cause I’ve got news for ya… We ALL suck. We ALL write crap. And we ALL have to live with it, working harder and getting better and still writing crap. Forever.

Ah, the peaceful life of a poet.

There is some good news though: All that crap eventually coughs up a diamond or two, and if you shine it up reeaaal nice, someone might just think it’s pretty enough to wear.
They won’t pay you for it, but still…

Next Up: Workshopping, Critiquing, Editing: Where Poems Go to Blossom or Die

If you have any questions, or disagree with anything in this post, I encourage you to leave a comment and I’ll answer you as soon as I can. Happy writing.