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Monday, March 2, 2015

How to ruin an almost good poem


For over a decade I chaired the poetry division in a well-run writing competition for poets and writers, and each year I noticed similar mistakes in poems that almost placed. Having learned from this recurring cycle of flaws and errors, I thought you might welcome the following list of things to avoid – not as you write, but as you revise.

• Expressing excessive sentimentality with such words as tears, heart, share, cry, and dear ole something or other

• Stating the obvious

• Writing lines that don't hum true

• Venting, arguing, and/or guilt-tripping readers 

• Bad-mouthing any person or group 

• Using punctuation like chicken pox

• Choosing fonts or colors that turn an editor’s eyes into disco balls

• Chatting without regarding potential readers

• Saying nothing fresh, insightful, imaginative, interesting, or new

• Including clichés that were imaginative a l-o-n-g time ago

• Using crude words, vulgar language, or other devices for shock value

• Emphasizing words that don't need to be noticed by rhyming end-lines – for instance, rhyming “the” and “me”

• Getting locked into end-line rhymes so strongly that syntax suffers, meaning muddies, and English teachers cringe

• Going on and on and on - as I'm truly trying not to do….



©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler has been blessed with many publishing credits including books of poems

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14 comments:

  1. Thanks, Joyce! And thanks, too, to Twitter followers who RT'd this. :)

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  2. All that advice can be so hard to swallow,
    You speak words of truth- and those I will follow! ;)

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  3. Good for you, Beth! That's the attitude needed to have poems accepted in journals.

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  4. Such great advice, Mary! As I've confessed to you before, poetry is my writing weakness, but these rules could also apply to prose, too. Thanks so much!

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  5. Thank you this is good stuff. Things I do yet was never told not to. I really appreciate everything you write, it is so encouraging.

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  6. I tend to be long winded, working on that.

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    1. Marsha, that's a common concern for many poets. Reading then intentionally writing 4-line humorous poems or 3-line haiku can help.

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  7. Thank you for sharing this valuable advise, Mary.

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    1. You're surely welcome, Laurie. Thanks for letting me know it helped. God bless.

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  8. The coolest advice I can think of, Mary. Thank you for telling me that a while ago. It is the best rule to begin editing. ��❤️❤️

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