30 Poetry TRAPS
Common Mistakes in Poems
If you read these first few words you are probably interested in writing poetry. Here are a few of the most common poetry traps to avoid in writing a poem. Of course, you more than likely do not like or even accept any premise of someone telling you what you can or cannot do, or should not do, or any variant of the above. There has long been the premise that there are no rules in art, and that is true, but there are many pitfalls along the way — better not to repeat.
The problem is, after reading poetry for say, over 50 years, patterns begin to be noticed. So, the question is why are poets writing the same thing over and over? Sure, a few trends here and there, minor fads, linguistic hooplas and well copied themes, but mostly nothing original—and originality, by the way, is now semi-forbidden by the poetry gatekeepers. Why? They need to keep control on the numbers of people writing poetry so that more and more people think they are writing poetry when really they are simply writing in a ‘mode’ which will not offend the other people writing and subscribing to the poe-biz venues. Once again, it is about the money, the control of aesthetics as product, not the art of poetry.
The poem traps. Once one of these traps begin, the poem can rarely extricate itself from further demise.
1. The poem is negative. Ever notice that most poems are negative? Oh, I know, Shakespeare had lots of negative things in his poetry and plays—but what is misunderstood is that it isn’t that a poem has negativity in the poem, but the fact that there is no redemption, nothing redeeming for the reader to consider. A vague platitude is not enough to substantiate worth in a poem. Depravity is another form of negativity. Bad things happen to everyone of us, but what matters is what you do to make things better. Also, such things as ‘despair.’ Relating to #10, despair or any version thereof, is simply the writer lacking poetic thoughts. The writer is really a journalist of some sort, a person who needs to write, can barely rise above doggerel, wrangles snakes in mid-air, formulates opinions into poetry-forms, and hopes no one notices.
2. Abstraction. The art of poetry is not the same thing as wallpaper design. The idea of taking words and making pretty sounds in experimental ways and calling it art is as dumb as splashing paint on a canvas and calling it art. Don’t be fooled by the art world and all the paintings and sculptures that look like they were made by primitive life forms. Or were they? Murky vagueness, obscurity, and the like are still being praised today like there is no tomorrow.
3. Ugliness and shock. Shock appeal is a cheap shot at creativity and will never impress anyone more than a few seconds. Lower level intelligence humans will be interested in shock because their brains cannot go beyond their limited level. Not much anyone can do about it.
4. Universality and omnipotent thoughts. Poets often see themselves as visionaries, and the moment they don the hat and the cape, the art immediately fails. Important!! Much in the same manner as omnipotent thinking, is the other side of the same coin: poems which are endless questions, which really is another form of arrogance in the extreme—“Oh, see how much humility, I, the great poet, embellish in cute fancy words the great unknowns.” What this really means is that the writer of words doesn’t have much of worth to say.
5. Lack of cohesion. So many poems use words that do not relate in any way to other words in the poem, the thoughts are disjointed, the reasoning in the poem sounds like artificial intelligence levels from 1958 pull-string talking toy figurines, or refrigerator magnet poems. Or scrabble poems. Poetry is not random words thrown up into the air and fallen on a busy road. I’ve read poems in which the images and situations have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Many writers fall off the edge and go slightly schizoid in trying so hard to be ‘creative.’ I’d like to add an example poem to show this, but there are so many being published today that it is embarrassing. Here is one recently in the New Yorker; (just copy the link) and then read the praise it receives. https://x.com/R_Turkewitz/status/1820128841094111632/photo/1
6. Stream of consciousness mode, or gag me with a spoon other ‘techniques’ to get words onto the page, as if words on a page are ‘proof’ of a poem. Rambling sentences do not a poem make.
7. Lack of common sense. If a poem does not have an identifiable subject, it is a waste of time to read it. Sure, sometimes a poem will have a mood, or have a feeling, or something with which to relate in some way, but if it doesn’t make any sense, the poem fails. Disjunctive juxtapositions to obliquely ‘hint’ or ‘refer’ to an emotion or thought is never going to work well. But many people just love that kind of thing. I think one reason they like it is because the bar is set so low they know they can do the same kind of thing and earn the moniker ‘poet.’ It is a kind of mob madness.
8. Didactic drills. Preachy, prosaic, murmerations. No one really cares how you tie your shoes.
9. Total focus on the self. Too much use of the word “I” is often a good indicator of narcissism, a trait all too common in poets. Narcissism repels.
10. The use of poetry as therapy. Poetry is never to be used as therapy—why? Because writing out problems can actual be useful to bring to the mind thing to improve, but it isn’t poetry—it is diary writing.
11. Diary writing pathos. Emotion mashups, personal angst, navel gazing, mundane meditations, grain of sand soliloquies, however interesting are in the end biographic blunders, and often are forms of backward-looking complaints about life, instead of forward momentum into greater life. Poetry is personal, always, but if the reader has no way of relating, the poem fails.
12. Explaining a poem into existence. A poem need not explain itself. This is complicated, but here is one way to tell if your poem is going down this route of explaining itself into existence: watch out for the use of the word ‘that.’ I’ve read poems when the word ‘that’ is used 4 or times because what is happening is that the poet is running out of steam and is in a hurry to get the poem finished. Oh, but, Robert Frost used ‘that’, ”…and that has made all the difference.” Yes, but in that case the use of the word ‘that’ in that line is bringing into clarity that whole poem. It is also used in a spoken speech manner, not as a descriptive construct to reverse engineer a concept.
Here excerpts from a poem by William Dickey (1928-1994)
which exemplifies what explaining a poem into existence means.
If this kind of thing is not looked for, the writer or the reader
will never notice such fall-down techniques of poor writing.
Also note the the directives to the reader which are often evidence of
a career in teaching, which often leads to many common pitfalls.
Therefore (a 15 line poem)
Nothing exists that[1] is not….
it was … by its….
Nothing exists that[2] does not …
and so … we must …
that[3] you will not go …
do always what you …
who can be …
it is that[4] sleeping place …
we attempt … and cannot…
that[5] makes us …
as if we knew even ….
13. Here is a big one. Irony. Let me not repeat myself a million times, but irony has no place in poetry. Irony is the lowest form of creative endeavor in writing anything. Oh, how ironic, this or that. Similar to a loopy plot, film noir dimwitness, irony never approaches truth, sincerity, originality, and is the same thing as making a dramatic movie and putting a chess set with pieces across the board in strategic layout, in the middle of a game, to add drama to the movie, yet upon closer inspection one can see the pieces are illogically set and mean nothing to the movie or to the game of chess—only the idea is there—when the movie makes little sense or is a nitwit theme. Irony has many definitions, but avoid them all. Irony is fake in any poem.
14. Any sort of codification. This is a form of double-speak, speaking in tongues, obtuse hits on meaning or emotion, overly expressionistic waving of symbols, the, ‘if you know, you know’ kind of snobbery and elitism pervading esoteric creative efforts.
15. Fantasy land. This is when the poem makes up strange images and dream-like themes which make no real sense. The poet does this because they have no real poetic thoughts to begin with. It is a kind of witchery to fool readers into thinking something profound is in the poem, when there is nothing but fluff.
16. Readerly poet-tone. Often difficult to detect, the words and sentences are really mish-mash thoughts, almost a kind of droning heard outside a bee hive. Close to free-association scribbling, readerly poet-tone tries to strike a note like chanting in a group. This prevents questioning anything about the poem. This is also part of the ‘no criticism’ cabals, wherein if you can fool enough people to form a clubby group in the same mode, the sense of belonging overshadows genuine art.
17. Talky bar-talk, text-message poetry. This is a big trap, and so common. Young writers often fall into this trap because they don’t have any reference points in the study of writing in history.
18. Anonymous speaker poetry. Just who on earth is the speaker in the poem? It is almost as if people demand artificial beings to talk to them about anything at all. Or artificial intelligence computers. This is tricky, theoretical. There is a balance in all writing. The writing should not sound like a particular person all the time, but be in language with which others can relate and speak. The reader wants and enjoys a particular person behind the poetry but the writing needs to be lifted into art, not regular conversation. Singing in rock, even opera, is the same.
19. Political and social issues. This is for journalism not poetry. Of course, some things will overlap in time and place in poetry, but even some venues are specifically focused on issues which have nothing to do with anything poetic at all, so why is it in poetry? I have a hard time even trying to explain the stupidity of such a premise. So much of time is spent and wasted in the discourse of small talk and frivolous matters that adding the same subjects into a poem is a sham and a misuse of an art. The subject of a poem is never far from the poem itself and if poetry is all about lawnmower repair—I bet the people interested in the poem are mostly interested in lawnmowers. Why let poetry waste your time?
20. Prose as poetry. Big hill to die on, I know. But my question is this; why do 99% of poems written today necessarily require and demand boring writing as the first element of any sentence? Answer the question. Prose is boring compared to poetry. You know, don’t you: Poetry is very difficult to write and most can’t do it so they, again, lower the bar and let prose be ‘called’ poetry. And usually it turns out to be badly written prose no matter what it is called.
I know this will never change. The cat is out of the bag and has run off into the woods and has returned as a tiger. Prose poems will be the norm until the end of time. What is not understood is that poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words. Boring language describing an interesting idea is still boring no matter what. But the form precedes the idea, and if the form is prose, the idea will no doubt be prose as well. Why? Because it is easier. Anything can be called poetry today, no matter what, no matter how bad, how shallow, how empty. A little essay rearranged into dribbling lines down a page is not real poetry.
21. Voiceless writing. If a human voice, (not the human brain) is not in a line, the line is human generated robot -talk and not poetry.
22. Poetry as collaboration. Poetry is not a poetry party. Poetry is not induced by random themes and trinket ideas. Possibly such efforts are for beginner students, or lit class exercises, but in the long run, such group silliness is just that, silliness. The sub thread is in the evidence—in the teacher mentality, in the, follow me mentality, but whatever it is, group-think is actually dangerous in all forms of life. The poet needs to think as an individual not as a crowd. And no real poet needs to be prompted to get to a poem. Real poets do not have writers block of any sort—and here is why: Real poets think in poetry, their reality is seen with poetry as the light source, not a made up classroom-studio where pottery wheels must be plugged in to start the work.
23. Total belief in the five-minute poem. Most poetry today is written in five minutes. No editing required. Oh, sure, some poets will say they edit, but they do not edit. They actually lie. They lie and they do not know the difference. They like to think that any line they write is fresh and if edited the line will go stale or forced. The first line is their ‘voice’ and that is that. No further discussion is necessary. They wrote it.
24. First person singular. Sure, now and then, first person is great. But first person must relate to the subject, which is, guess what—the first person! And if all you are going to write about is yourself, well, get over it. You are not that interesting, trust me. The chances are that you are actually a bore—as a person. The person is not the poem, ever. The main indicator of this fakery is the over-use of the word “I” which, of course, is obvious. When the writer overly uses the word “I” the reader is the last one being consulted by the time the poem is finished. If the reader is not consulted in any way, the poem is ultra drivel in the end.
25. Diary writing. This relates to the first person singular. Many poems sound like diary entries transposed on the page to appear like poetry.
26. Oracle mask. This is when the ‘speaker’ of in a poem assumes authority of some sort. And along with this is the ‘weasel coat’ which is when the ‘speaker’ in a poem wavers and questions and wonders and whines and interrupts itself with doubt and meanderings as if they are a thoughtful person, a person with feelings, on a journey of discovery, and also, most importantly, a sensitive person. Oh good grief, another sensitive poet! Sensitive people are dime a dozen, folks. The poet may well be sensitive but so is everyone else. Four letters, ‘p-o-e-t’ lipsticked across the forehead does not make the writer a poet.
27. “YOU.” Cheap trick number one. Adding in or addressing the reader as “you” in a poem to pull the reader in and make the reader seem as if they are part of the process, or are included in the poem world. This is obnoxious when “you” think about it. It is a kind of politician oratory.
28. Constant use of inference, implication, or symbolism. This is a hidden kind of ‘sneering at the reader.’ Too many poets do actually think they are special among the populace. They like to think of themselves as prophets. The old saying, ‘prophets are always from out of town’ applies here. If the poet talks in a normal fashion in a poem they will be found out to be a regular person, so, in order to have ‘followers’ they step up the messages a little to draw in believers like little sheep and then some of the little sheep want to be poets so they repeat the same method over and over.
29. All poetry is sincere. Nope. Most of poetry today is fake, phony, a kind of concocted babbling fake speech in fashion mode. The same thing is true for much of Victorian poetry, there were many common modes of writing and ideas. Same today. Be aware of exactly what you are writing and how you are writing and do not write blind. Poetry is a kind useful consciousness, a clarification of being, where you are and how you are aware.
30. Your life is separate from your poetry. Not true. Your life is your poetry—which means that if your life is lived in a crummy manner, your poetry will be crummy. If you are awful, your poetry will be awful. If you are shallow, so will your poetry be shallow. Your poetry will expose all the truth about you. Do not conflate this with what year or make of car you drive, because that is not the level of discussion. Character and personality, ethics, values, all will be revealed in your poetry, maybe not all at once, but soon. And there are two parts to this; you, the author, will be revealed in the subjects and, in the writing, in the form, in the structure of the writing. Just say over to yourself; horrible person, horrible poetry. I hear the objection from the back of the auditorium: I know this person, good, bad, bad poetry, good poetry, and so on. Not true. The person and the poetry will match on all levels and elements. It will take a long time, possibly, for this to be evident once all factors are applied, but you will see that it is true.