Poetry:
Some #1 Things to Look Out For
Before handing in material for workshop, check for at least a few of these problems.
OR: if you are workshopping someone’s poems, consider the following issues.
1. Language which is excessively ABSTRACT. This is one of the main problems with beginner
poems. Abstraction isn't always bad, but younger writers usually don't handle it with
precision and specificity. Abstractions are made of air; you can't feel or experience them.
There's no experience on the page for the reader to share. Get real; be concrete.
2. Language which is OVERLY GENERAL. Be specific. Move the mike in closer. What—you
afraid of really hearing what you're trying to say?
Younger poets often confuse the general with the "universal." That is, they think that really
general language means the reader "can get anything they want out it." They think the
generalities make the language special and evocative.
But if something means absolutely anything, it means nothing. Yes, the magic of poetry is its
resonance and nuance, its unparaphrasable meanings, the way it lends itself to many valid
readings and responses. But that richness comes from detail and specificity, infused with the
poet's whole and unique engagement of heart, mind, imagination, and REAL experience.
Don't confuse "rich" and "universal" and "resonant" with plain old vague, overgeneralized
writing.
3. Language which is STALE. Language out in the world is forever going so dead we don't hear
or feel it anymore. One of your tasks as a poet is to kick it in the ya-ya. NO CLICHÉS.
4. FOREGONE message or theme; writer has made no discoveries; ideas and feelings in the
poem are pre-determined or pat (second-hand).
3. Somewhat related to #4 above: the poem which lectures the reader. This kind of poem often
has a single, didactic message which, because delivered in a preachy way, doesn't convince
the reader of anything. (In fact, it will likely just antagonize them and polarize the situation
further.) Such pieces tend to simplify good and evil into easy black/white categories, with evil
being external to the poem's speaker and safely located in some "them" outside the poet and
the poem. This kind of poem also suffers from staleness, since it was understood by the writer
before being written.
Occasionally the didactic poem succeeds somewhat because it uses humor, or because the
speaker implicates herself in what she is interrogating (and thus acknowledges the complexity
and real challenges of good and evil). Or it may work on the stage as a slam piece (the poet's
performance skills make up for what the poem lacks). Or it may work somewhat because of
sheer voltage—the intensity of its anger and frustration. But it's rare.
5. Premature closure. The writer became self-satisfied, did not engage the live process and let
the poem take them some place.
6. "Talkiness." Rather than allowing images and detail to work implicitly on the reader, the
speaker explains them away. Shut up already. Show, don't tell.
7. Sentimentality or cheese; the piece would be more appropriate on a greeting card (not that
greeting cards have to be schlock).
8. Inattention to the MUSIC OF LANGUAGE:
o No verbal texture. No sensory feel or pleasure in the diction, phrasing, syntax.
o No meaningful lineation (line breaks are willy-nilly or actually work against feeling
and sense).
o Weak rhyme or ill distribution of rhyme:
 Rhymes occur only at ends of lines.
 Rhymes are too "jouncy-bouncy"; do not mesh with the poem's feeling and
sense.
 Rhymes are too easy or predictable.
 Types of rhyme are limited and don't engage the ear. Nothing but exact and
masculine rhymes. (These are most common and, after awhile, not super
interesting.)
 Rhymes are forced; sentence syntax is skewed to make end rhymes come out.
Don't invert syntax to force an end rhyme.
9. The poem does not show awareness of other poetry. It's obvious the writer has never bothered
to read any contemporary stuff, much less the classics. That's embarrassing.
10. No pay-off. Nothing in the poem makes it worth re-reading. Or it feels like absolutely
anybody can do it.
HEY! Not every poem has to be brilliant and earthshattering—far from it. But every poem should have
something, some spark, some attention to the gifts of language.
* "Sentimentality" =

Foregone rather than discovered sentiment.

Sentiment which the writer seems to congratulate herself for having.

Sentiment which is stale, has not been made alive again or discovered anew.

An unearned implicit claim by the speaker to be feeling something (no detail, no
surprise, no associative drama or struggle in the poem authenticates the claim).
Recall Lorca's comments about duende.

A failure of the imagination to engage real, live, ongoing issues—emotional,
intellectual, spiritual, physical—on the page.

An overly easy acceptance of solutions to those issues.

NO DUENDE!
What's Goin' On?
Beginner poems are often a string of broad generalities and abstractions with no context. Often, the
implicit point of such poems is to provide the reader a sort of open reverie. ("I left my poem vague so
the reader can get whatever she wants out of it.") There's nothing wrong with open reverie, but you
can get that completely on your own— ice-fishing, jerking off, skimming tabloid headlines in a
check-out line...
If you've left your poem so general that it could mean anything—then it means nothing. The reader
might as well go stare at a tree.
A poem should have something "going on," as we used to say in the 70s.
A glimpse into the mind and heart of the writer—a strange and separate human being.
Specific, real, unexpected details and images.
Interesting language.
Moving language.
Odd feelings.
Formal experiment.
Wit.
Brains.
Subtlety.
Voltage.
Real inquiry (the speaker of the poem is asking REAL questions; not ones which the writer already
knows the answers to).
Hell, if nothing else, give us sheer weirdness.
So. Get going.
On.