Three Poems You Don’t Want to Write

What makes a poem good? Who can say?

Good poetry is like pornography: we know it when we see it. A money-shot of Jenna Jameson is world’s away from the The Birth of Venus, but if you ask me why one naked woman is art and the other is smut, it’s hard to say. 

Likewise, I can say “The best part of waking up/is Folger’s in your cup” and even though it employs poetic devices, we see it as nothing more than a slogan. However, if I say: “You can write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies/you my trod me in the very dirt/ but still, like dust, I rise…”you know it’s the good stuff. 

I don’t know why the saying “These are the times that try men’s souls” resonates with me but I do know why”times are so hard” just sounds like a petty complaint.

It’s much easier to say what makes a poem bad than what makes it good.

The Sentimental Poem

A sentimental poem is not just a ”sad” or “sappy” poem. Sentimentality is emotion for the sake of emotion. Put it like this: sentimentality is like staging a funeral just so you can cry. 

The problem with such a funeral is that there is no body in the casket- the whole thing is a sham. In the event of a real loss, the emotions are diverse. A person sitting here might be “glad the fool is dead”. The person sitting there might be grateful that the sickness is over. Someone else might sit, absolutely still, muted by grief. The man outside might be just realizing he’s come to the wrong funeral. Hatred, relief, embarassment. All emotional shades of gray that sentimental poems don’t acknowledge. Sentimentality thrives on cliche and oversimplicity.

Sentimental poetry depends on getting an emotional reaction instead of conveying truth or experience. Poetry should be concerned with the latter, because if the reader gets a sense of being there and seeing things, then they will feel those emotions, without the cliches. The use of nouns, verbs and form can get the message across.

The Didactic Poem

If a poem’s foremost purpose is to give information or instruction, then it is didactic verse. Didactic verse is from the “Early to bed, early to rise” school of verse. 

Didactic poems are like the stories I had to read aloud during Sunday mornings services as a teenager. The stories invariably caused the congregation to nod, congratulating themsleves on thier compliance with all things holy.  

I preferred reading from Ecclesiastes (All is vanity, man’s days are full of sorrow)or the near final chapters of the book of Job. When I did the room would have a puzzled silence. These scriptures don’t get much play because they seem pessimistic or dark and they raise too many questions. Since most people read the Bible as a how-to book, they tend to skip over the passages that don’t have easy rules to follow.

The best poetry is something like the least favorite bits of the Bible: make a strong statement with imagery, be subtle. Hide a little revelation in your words. You can blow someone’s mind with a poem like that.

The Rhetorical Poem

Rhetorical poetry is like an evening gown at Burger King. Overblown, high-flung, grandiose and verbose, rhetorical poetry trips the reader up in “o’ers” and “wherefores” until the meaning- if not lost altogether- is up-staged by the flowery language. But poetry is supposed to be “fancy”, isn’t it? Not really.

“I’m so hip, even my errors are correct”- Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping”

“There’s been a death, in the opposite house”- Emily Dickinson

“Some say the world will end in fire/some say in ice”- Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”

“This is just to say/I have eaten the plums…” William Carlos Williams

In fact, even Shakespeare, who seems so “dressed-up” to modern speakers of English, actually wrote in a straightforward, everyday manner, even giving us some of the earliest known uses of the “f” word(!). In Much Ado About Nothing, the character Claudio’s speech is described as a feast with too many strange dishes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, the famous play-within-a-play scenes are acted out in overdressed words- an ironic statement on Shakespeare’s part.

The worst thing about rhetorical poetry is that it fails to connect with the reader. It puts on airs. With poetry, it’s not just what you mean, it’s the way you mean it. An over-written poem says “I am the poet. I know lots of impressive words.”

The Bottom Line

Poetic excellence is a matter of degree. None of these categories has clear sharp lines, separating the great from the good from the bad.  How much is too much pepper? It depends on the dish.No one can give you an exact number of words or syllables that add up to the right level of sentiment or rhetoric- but just like obscenity- you’ll know it when you see it.