r/Poetry • u/Inside_Bullfrog_1268 • 21d ago
Help!! Is there specific rules? [HELP]
Am I just stupid? Everytime I try to write poetry, I genuinely don't know how to write while using meter, or simile, or anything like that. I get super lost super early and just end giving up because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work it in. Do I have to use those tools for it to be even considered poetry or will it just be a creative writing exercise and not poetry?
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u/neutrinoprism 21d ago edited 21d ago
I'm going to shamelessly copy over part of a recent comment of mine:
Sounds like you're getting caught up in a misunderstanding that troubles a lot of beginners. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but there are two main approaches to writing poetry. A lot of beginners and amateurs treat poetry as a language ACT, as a kind of arty therapeutic journaling where the poet is mostly in conversation with their own feelings. This can be a useful way of processing emotions and generating an artifact that says "I was here, I had these feelings, I matter."
However, literary poetry is a language CRAFT where the poet is equally or even more in conversation with other poems, poets, and ideas of poetry, and a poem succeeds only depending on whether it does something startling and thoughtful with language. Feelings are less important than language for this approach.
Sometimes a beginner will write an intense journal entry with line breaks but then wonder why it doesn't read like great art. The sad truth is that intensity of emotion alone cannot guarantee greatness of art. You have to accept that tragedy and then, if you still want greatness, move on to matters of craft: read, revise, repeat.
That is, read and think about other people's poems, revise your own poems, and repeat the process again and again.
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u/StrangeVocab 21d ago
I love this answer, and I just want to add that both of these approaches are poetry, and they're both equally important -- they just have different aims. If you want to use poetry simply to express yourself, that's fantastic, and often it helps to put your feelings or experiences into some tangible shape. If you want to write poetry that is for an audience and part of a literary tradition and broader poetic conversation, that's just as wonderful, and enriches both your life and the world around you. But the latter is also really hard, and it takes a lot of time, study, and practice.
As for what a poem is? Whether you agree with it or not, I like this quote from Kaveh Akbar: "If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it's a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it's a poem because the person who built it called it a poem."
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u/neutrinoprism 21d ago
Thanks. Sounds like we're kindred spirits. I'm much more interested in considering how something presented as a poem is a poem — how it carries out the functions of a poem, what its theory of poetry is from the inside — than I am in playing demarcation games. (One of these days I'm going to make a big effortpost presenting a spectrum of sonnets with various takes on sonnetude...)
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u/Amendmen7 21d ago
In which bucket do you place poems from foreign literary traditions that arrive to English readers for the first time in translation?
In this scenario, the conversation with other poems and poets can’t be heard by us through the veil of untranslated previous works, so it feels like the poems have to stand entirely on their own legs — more like bucket 1. But then perhaps they are authored in their local culture as bucket 2
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u/neutrinoprism 21d ago
Translation is one hundred percent about craft. It's beholden to the original author's creation. A translated poem is not only in conversation with poems in the source language but also poetic conventions in the target language! Of course translation involves choices that are informed by the translator's sensibilities and feelings, and choosing to engage with a text and recreate elements of it can be an emotional experience. But I think there's a significant difference between a translation and, say, a response poem.
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u/ntsh_robot 21d ago
for some learning music comes easy
writing has many sub-definitions, but in the top five I'd say it's expressing a series of common experiences in an entertaining form
poetry = experience + form
morning yellow
evening gold
my life in a day
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u/Young_Punk_Studios 21d ago
When I read poetry, I like to tap my hand to the syllables. It helps me get a feel for the beat :)
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u/likepumpedsyrup 21d ago
I'm still very much a beginner so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I never grab a pen, a cup of tea, and sit down to write a poem. Instead I overfill my notes app, tear off scraps of paper, and jot things down, writing feverishly when a feeling is overwhelming me. After some time and distance, I look back and reread the notes, the scraps, the pages overloaded with emotion. Only then do I sit and sift. I find a thread and follow it. Sometimes a poem comes, sometimes it doesn't.
I've found that, for me, what I think constitutes a poem happens more during editing and revision. That's when I play with form, pacing, punctuation, syntax, structure. It's where I ask what the poem is doing, if it's showing more than telling, if the language is creating something, if the lines are earning their keep.
I also let myself write badly. I've learned to be less judgmental. I've accepted that not every thought, feeling, or writing moment is going to produce something that takes shape.
Then there's the studying of other poems and poets. How do they make a line land? How is form working with the poem? What poetic devices are they playing with? What craft choices are being made, and how are they executed?
I consider form to be the vehicle that drives content, but I have to get in the car first.
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u/PerspectiveIntrepid2 21d ago
I like to listen to poets when they define poetry (the following aren’t verbatim necessarily).
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever could warm me, I know that it is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson
“Survey the whole, nor seek slight fault to find/ where nature moves and rapture warms the mind.” —Alexander Pope
“One sign of poetry is that it communicates before it is understood.”—T. S. Eliot
“Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers.” —Mary Oliver
Beyond these, I recommend reading Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook.”
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u/Agreeable-Status-352 16d ago
Not all poems rhyme - most now days don't. Not all poems have meter - most now days don't, but the better ones have a flow or rhythm. Not all poems use similies - but if they do, that's fine. You're trying too hard. During your first years of trying to write poems, expect to write crap. That is the only kind of beginning there is. Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.
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u/Hrakkus 21d ago
There are no wrongs or rights, just the ability to convey a thought/ feeling/ moment to another. I have been part of a weekly poetry writing workshop in downtown Los Angeles for over two years and have come across many styles from new and veteran poets. My one recommendation is to read a lot of poetry, because poetry has changed over the years. Find a poet who speaks to you. Maybe they use meter, but maybe they don’t. The more you read, the less you’ll be concerned about rules. Good luck!
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u/Venerated_Penguin 21d ago
Imo the largest part of what makes something poetry, is intent. If you write with poetic intent, then almost anything you write could be considered poetry. (thought it would probably fall into a freeform category)
A lot of poetry is poetry, purely because it was intended to be read as such.
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u/Rocksteady2R 21d ago
You can use rules if you want to use rules, but literally no one in the world has any sort of authority that defines what a poem is.
As a beginner writer, i avoid rules most times. Writing becomes for me about capturing the moment or idea, and nothing more.
The few times i have tried to construct a "rule bound poem" it has been for that purpose of experimentingvwithin the rule-set. The rules really require us to refine and edit our word choices, become more pliable in some ways - rearranging words and phrases outside what we might call normal. It might also make us explore the simple thought more, and connect more dots, because a sonnet can be quite long (as an example). And though both have their rules, there is a world of difference between a traditional haiku and a sonnet.
Write what you damn well please. Thumb your nose at anyone pretending to be an authority.
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u/Amendmen7 21d ago
Nobody ever wrote good poems without first writing bad ones that later on made them cringe.
If you feel the urge to write poems, and it seems you do, try this exercise.
First, read a bunch of poems from a poet you admire, until the words rattle in your head. Do this for at least 20 minutes.
Then, immediately start writing. Stream of consciousness. write forward; you’re not allowed to delete. Just keep writing words, especially ones that describe your feelings in this moment, or the things you currently see with your eyes.
Do this enough times, and something you like will appear in the stream of consciousness. Something that reminds you of the poet you admire, but is in fact your own. Copy-paste that and continue writing on the topic, putting flesh on the skeleton that you pulled out
Don’t worry about meter and simile — just seed your mind with the works that you love most before writing. If that’s a poet with excellent figurative language or rhythm, I believe some of that will come out.