1001 Rules for writing Poetry (Humorous or otherwise)

[greenmountaineer]

Similes work well when "like, as, or as if" add to the sound of a line. Otherwise, try for a metaphor.

"Protective of her children, she can be as an angry as a Momma bear."

"She's a Momma bear around her cubs."

 

[Magnetron]

Give every reader of your poem his or her money's worth of entertainment.

If you were in the film industry, this would translate to movie goers walking out of the theatre recommending their friends and family see your film at least once.

Treat others as you wish to be treated or cheat others out of an experience that may kindle a greater interest in poetry.

You can still make your poems appeal to more experienced readers.

Don't limit yourself to one audience or the other with idiotic elitist beliefs.

 

[Tzara]

It is not at all clear what number we're up to, so I am simply making up:

15. Do not be afraid to be bad.

My standard rule. Which means, I think, that you should try things, whether you feel competent at them or not, whether you think anyone else will like them or not. Try things, if you are interested in them. Poetry advances because poets try things. If you write poetry that all the authorities approve of, you are writing exercises, not poetry.

 

[champagne1982]

16, 17 or 92?

Learn the rules so you can understand the reasons for breaking them.

Be conscientious of grammar and spelling. For instance, if you choose not to use punctuation, make sure you're omitting it to suit the poem and not because you're too lazy to learn if you should place a comma or a period.

Experiment with the above rules. Just don't be surprised or offended if offered critique questions your motives or skills.

Read.
Read.
Read.

You should read at least twice as many poems as you write.

 

[greenmountaineer]

"The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched."

Donald Hall, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2006-2007

 

[Magnetron]

Don't be afraid to make up words.

 

[greenmountaineer]

Don't be afraid to make up words.

Agreed, Mags. In fact, I've always imagined you to be a blinrutz because my mother was born in Wisconsin, but I could be wrong.

 

[Magnetron]

Agreed, Mags. In fact, I've always imagined you to be a blinrutz because my mother was born in Wisconsin, but I could be wrong.

That's news to me, you hymendinker.

 

[butters]

Agreed, Mags. In fact, I've always imagined you to be a blinrutz because my mother was born in Wisconsin, but I could be wrong.

That's news to me, you hymendinker.

^^ a coupla kershmenches if ever i saw 'em

 

[Remec]

^^ a coupla kershmenches if ever i saw 'em

Well, y'know, quackmiggles will brommet, after all.

 

[legerdemer]

Well, y'know, quackmiggles will brommet, after all.

Splurfect!

 

[butters]

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Well, y'know, quackmiggles will brommet, after all.

Only if oilystranglemushed on a Wednesday!

 

[Magnetron]

Your goal should be to create a poem that will be read more than once because the reader enjoyed it.

Not because it was cryptic, shocking or excessively surreal.

In other words, don't stoop to gimmicks.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Your goal should be to create a poem that will be read more than once because the reader enjoyed it.

Not because it was cryptic, shocking or excessively surreal.

In other words, don't stoop to gimmicks.

Depends what you mean by a gimmick, One man's gimmick is another woman's spirit level.

 

[Magnetron]

Depends what you mean by a gimmick, One man's gimmick is another woman's spirit level.

A gimmick would be a method of encouraging the reader to read a poem more than once with an incentive other than the reading itself being a rewarding experience.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

A gimmick would be a method of encouraging the reader to read a poem more than once with an incentive other than the reading itself being a rewarding experience.

I've incited a few things in my time (one resulted in a Police car and a Black Maria, but that's another story!)

 

[Magnetron]

I've incited a few things in my time (one resulted in a Police car and a Black Maria, but that's another story!)

Don't forget tricking me into reading your paradelle numerous times knowing all along you purposely scrambled the words up to make it sound even more cockamamie.

 

[Magnetron]

Avoid using the word like as much as possible, ESPECIALLY preceded with other words like looked, tasted, smelled, felt, etc.

Her red hair looked like a burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Just say a, is or was. Or nothing at all.

Her red hair is a burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Bursting of sunrise was her red hair in the gaslight.

Her red hair burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Her red hair, bursting of sunrise in the gaslight

 

[legerdemer]

Avoid using the word like as much as possible, ESPECIALLY preceded with other words like looked, tasted, smelled, felt, etc.

Her red hair looked like a burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Just say a, is or was. Or nothing at all.

Her red hair is a burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Bursting of sunrise was her red hair in the gaslight.

Her red hair burst of sunrise in the gaslight.

Her red hair, bursting of sunrise in the gaslight

I agree with this one wholeheartedly - but it is difficult, and oh how they do sneak by...

 

[UnderYourSpell]

No idea what number we got up to.
There is a form of poem called an Epic, but if you're going to write reams and reams don't forget you've got to keep your reader's attention, something that's very hard to do. So edit, edit, edit then go back and edit some more.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Bumpety bump

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Anyone want to add any more helpful points to this?

 

[cascadiabound]

I know that I am guilty of lots of these problems, but here are a few suggestions I have adapted from some other places:


Suggestions/ Feedback for new poetry writers

Certain types of feedback are recursive; therefore, a summary may be useful. Of course, these are not actual “rules” and there are good reasons to break them. With that said, consider the following suggestions as you begin to write:


1. Writer- as opposed to reader- focused writing (eg, poem as diary-entry)

Often people will say they write poetry for themselves, as an emotional outlet. Obviously, this is not necessarily a bad thing, however once you give the poem to someone else to read (whether that is an on-line forum, writing workshop, a friend or family member) and ask their opinion, the underlying assumption is that there is something is the poem to interest the reader. If someone is a close friend or family member, chances are that your raw emotion will be enough to hold their interest, because they know and care about you. Those of us who don’t know you however will normally require a reason to be interested in your feelings. Rather than simply spilling out all your emotions on the page, consider, “What is there here to interest an outside reader?”

Obviously, it is possible to write an I-poem that would be of interest to others. For example, Anna Who Was Mad, by Anne Sexton. In this case the writer creates an interest in the feelings of the narrator by her use of imagery and repetition. She doesn’t just say, “I am anguished and given to disturbing and repetitive thoughts”, she re-creates the experience of craziness so the reader begins to feel bit of it themselves.

i.e. interesting poems will tend to engage and involve the reader, rather than just talking at them. Which brings us to:


2. Overuse of abstract language

Abstraction are those things that cannot be experienced directly by the senses (for example, “beauty”, “hope”, “love”, “tenderness”, “cruelty”, etc). Much has been said about abstractions and why they are bad for poetry. The short version is: poems tend to be more effective if they recreate an experience rather than simply telling us about it. We can only experience the world through our senses, not directly through language. Therefore, the further your language is from describing something the reader can see, feel, hear, taste or smell for themselves, the further you will be from re-creating that experience. No one knows what “love” looks like, but we’ve all experienced the thud of our own heartbeat (or that of your loved one, if you hug them close), the smell of your partner’s skin, the sensation of warmth in your belly. Describing these things will tend to involve your reader more directly than simply saying, “I love you”.

Just as for the I-poem, there is a place for abstractions in poetry. For instance, Marianne Moore’s work is crammed with abstractions. But she illustrates each abstraction with specific imagery which brings it more to life. If you cut out the sensory images, you’d just have a mini-lecture, and it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

Abstractions can also take the form of clichés (see section 4 below). For example, once you've heard the expression "fluffy as a cloud" or "rosy fingered dawn" a thousand times, you stop visualizing the intended textural description, stop imagining rays of pink light breaking in shafts stretching out from the horizon, and the words become a sort of mental placeholder, a way of not having to think about the imagery (which is the opposite of what you would normally want to achieve in a poem).

I actually interpret the poem “Poetry” as a very useful comment on abstractions, but more direct essays can be found here:

Wiki article on clichés
Notes from Ezra Pound's "A Retrospect"


3. Excessive generalizations

Consider that you want to write a poem about your mother, and your first line is "My mother is a wonderful woman, she loves me more than anyone". We'll assume for the sake of argument that the poem carries on in this generic way, without providing any specific detail relating to your mother as an individual or examples of how her love was demonstrated. For you as the writer, no more imagery is required, you already know lots and lots of specific things about your mother. For you, the word "mother" will therefore conjure up lots of images: her face, the way stray hairs escape from her ponytail when she's spent the day in the garden, her range of expressions, perhaps the scent of her perfume or the Virginia Slims she smokes, the flowered apron she wears when she's doing the washing up and her pink rubbery gloves, the way the tendons in her hands flex when she kneads dough (if she kneads dough), etc etc. But to a reader who doesn't know her personally, "mother" is just a word, and "wonderful" a generic adjective that could apply to pretty much any mother (or at least about 80% of them, according to their children). There's nothing particularly unique or interesting about it, nothing that creates a distinct image, unless you fill us in on a bit of the detail. Generally speaking, if you don't provide specific images that set your mother (or your lover, or the first time you had sex, or the time you nearly died or whatever) apart from the generic concept of "mother" (or lover, sex, NDE etc), the poem will be a bit faceless and less likely to engage your reader.


4. Clichés and lack of novelty

Consider the following definition of cliché: “a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse, such as sadder but wiser, or strong as an ox.”

So this is fairly simple: if the intent of a poem is to engage and excite your reader, you have to ask, why would someone want to read something they’ve read a thousand times before? Why bother to write about something if you don’t have a fresh perspective or something new to offer the reader?

There are a few links for sites listing clichés here. Note that it isn't just stock phrases; themes and imagery can be clichéd as well. So, if you're tackling one of the big themes (love, friendship, birth, death, god, loneliness, "man's inhumanity to man", etc), you need to think more carefully about how you can offer a fresh perspective, because millions of poems have been written on these topics already.


5. Strained or nonsensical rhymes

Poems don’t have to rhyme. Very often it’s better if they don’t. There are lots of ways of creating music in a poem that don’t involve end rhymes. But it’s particularly dreadful to see a poem with tortured syntax or which makes a nonsense statement simply to accommodate a rhyme. When you first start writing, it’s probably better not to attempt rhyming – it’s quite difficult to do well, and it’s a constraint that places unnecessary limitations upon the writer.

If you’re absolutely desperate to rhyme, you should ensure that a) it sounds natural and you haven’t had to resort to an awkward placement of words to achieve it (eg, “When in the morning I first wake, a cup of coffee I do take” would be an example of some fairly spectacularly tortured syntax) and b) you haven’t strangled the meaning just to achieve it (eg, “You know it’s you I truly love, You are special like a dove”).

Rhymes tend to draw attention to words, so ideally the words you draw attention to should be interesting ones that add meaning to the poem. You may also wish to experiment with rhymes in the middle of lines rather than at the end, and other sonic devices such as assonance and consonance, which tend to be a bit more subtle than end rhymes.


6. Use of self-consciously poetic or antiquated language

Perhaps because many of us had mostly 17th and 18th century poetry fed to us in school (and some never read beyond this for some peculiar reason), occasionally you see people using words like "ere" or "ne'er" or "naught" or even "doth" in modern poems. No one speaks like that these days, so if you use that sort of language in a poem, it will draw undue attention to itself. That's fine if you want the focus of your poem to be the word "ere", but otherwise, use modern English. The idea is to make the ideas and imagery the focus of the poem, not to jar the reader out of the experience by using unnatural language.


7. Novelty formatting

Standard formatting for a poem is for the lines to be left-justified and for punctuation and capitalization to follow the normal rules of English grammar. If you deviate from this, or use weird fonts or bolding or colors, do so because you want to create an effect that adds to that particular poem, not just because you think it looks cool generally. Otherwise, the effect will be to draw attention away from your poem to the format of the poem.


Final note: for anyone interested in seeking out really bad poetry, check out the following:

Worst Verse
Vogon Poetry Generator

 

[UnderYourSpell]

A lot of good points although I disagree about rhyming poems, I and several others here (Tzara, Champagne, Guilty Pleasure to name but a few) write them often. I find them easier than Free form which I didn't write at all when I first arrived here. It was what I was taught at school and knew no other way to write poetry. I do agree about some of the tortured efforts that abound and was labelled 'Yoda speak' on here many years ago.
I used to do Teach Ins where poets were challenged to write out of their comfort zone, broaden their horizons which I don't think is a bad thing, after all if I'd only been willing to stick with rhyming everything I'd never have got round to non rhyming. A wonderful poetess called WickedEve that used to rule us with a rod of iron, gave me a kick up the backside and literally made me try, she believed in me. Thanks Eve