Yale Review, Winter 2024 & Spring 2025, A Review of the Poetry

Examples of How Not to Write Poetry

Photo thomasjardine.com

Most poetry these days, writing this in early 2025, is odd gibberish. The oblique approach to logic and sense is extreme and poetry has been under this idiotic spell for what, 30, 50 years? This is not opinion, this is provable. Apart from what any poet thinks their poem is about, or what one of their poems is supposedly trying to prove, the form in which the poem is written and is plain as day, since it is, no pun intended, written on the page for anyone to see.

For an example, I will take the 2024 Winter and the Spring 2025 edition of the Yale Review and show only the last portion of each published poem. No authors names since it doesn’t really make any difference since I can’t tell them apart—the form in the language is nearly identical—it is as if they all got together and made an anti-trust agreement in objection to originality. Since almost every single poem follows the same rule of dumb lineation in short little lines, I will delineate the lines to get an easy sense of the form in the language.

The first objection I hear to this is that something is being taken out of context from something—but I am talking about the form and not the subject or content of the poems. Most writers today do not see the form in which they write—so it is like looking at a painting in which the artist has no idea how to mix colors.

In essence, the poets are writing blind.

The Yale Review is mostly essays and fiction and other standard prose, and poetry is interspersed throughout the issues, and I don’t know exactly why this is done. Why not just put all the poems in one section? Poetry as afterthought? Page filler? Here goes:

…Myself, to distill, for decades, who I was, vessel, given in in reverent surrender, thinking always of the world that let me stay this long, the branch of air I become that is the room’s air, and the meadow’s. [yes: “…given in in reverent…]

…goalposts dressed in mist eroding their alphabet; and by the front gate with its slippery grid, the main road to and fro, and cars with somewhere to go bending their angry lights on me in my dressing gown with my hair on end.

…she should respect herself, he said: a letter composed of one word tucked into a wrinkled envelope on which she’d also smudged some cigarette ash: a single word above a blackened X and that word was NO.

…Wet mauve, like mouths not singing along. Little porcelain cradles. And at one time they were everywhere. You don’t see them much anymore, do you? Lady slippers, I think they were called.

…that blood, that shit, that piss, this sudden fit of peace, this please. Please, this. This peace. This, this… [actual end of poem.]

…If you’re one of the chosen few people on Earth that’s lucky enough to get your hands on a steak, bite the shit out of it. Thank you for knowing my name. Goodnight.

…I will make various decisions, all pointing me in one direction or another. There is an attempt to get closer to you, and then there is the rest.

…They will die away any day now, for lack of a stag. Their nature is muted, without place. But they have meant so much. They have meant while my love hunts their grammar from the summer light.

…where echoes held together and collapsed into songs more and more sings dirges ballads requiem two-step aubade the kind from the radio till someday you find one song one real song and in the song will be a grail a real grail [end of sentence, no punctuation.]

…I know you enjoy their games and make up games for them, as if you were The One, the one they might share a secret with, like the code of holy orders a prime number keeps.

…That’s not knowledge. The road’s all turned around in the hill. My breath inflates another gray skull and before I can make out a face, it turns and heads for the trees.

…the beat did not so much arrive to our ears as emanate from our bones divine mystery they called it. freckled cowslip. peach whose seed undid the tongue which is now an animal loosed upon the golden streets

And so one can see the common structure. There is a kind of desperation to explain everything, to use dull prose to get to a swishy idea and most importantly, to pay no attention to original voice or unique form. I believe the editors are sincere in their efforts, or at least unto themselves, and genuinely think their editorial decisions are worthy. The fact that they can’t see the incredible dullness in the lines and structure is probably testament to their own lack of creative intelligence. And the poets are the same, genuine and sincere in their efforts, yet unable to see the forest in which they write—because it is all they are able to see.

In every single poem, the you, the I, the our, the we, the self as focal point—is loud and clear.

Of course, the self can be interesting, but when it is right there in your face over and over, the reader becomes tired and drained by listening to people talk about themselves without any redeeming value. The obsession with the self is extreme and, why is this? It is almost more than confessional poetry, which isn’t poetry at all, by the way. Confessional poetry is merely sharing personal problems in notational diary form. Most poetry today exhibits a kind of neurosis.

In poetry world, I heard university lit groups in the 80’s & 90’s started frowning on poetry criticism and started ‘everyone has a voice’ and each voice is wonderful. Everything and anything is art today, each and every artist is exactly equal. If anyone speaks up, not only are they disliked, they are shunned, blocked.

To the crowd and the mob, to belong is more important than the truth. But isn’t that university life?

There are a few people who understand what I am talking about in this essay, and here and there they speak up, like clear-eyed outliers encamped on small, drifting, melting ice floes.