Crafting Publishable Poetry

by Kate Robinson

You’ve been writing since you heard “I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree” (Joyce Kilmer) in grammar school, but only your friends and family are impressed. Your sonnets and sestinas lack zest. Literary journals send your work back with those apologetic form rejections. You know you can take your poetry to the next level.  While there are no precise formulas, there are literally hundreds of possible techniques that will help you achieve your goal of publication. The list of fourteen tips that follows contains some of the basics.

Think re-vision, the art of seeing again.  One of the most common mistakes of the beginning poet is to consider a first draft or early revision the finished product. While some good work occasionally makes its way from imagination to the page without revision, most outstanding poems are the product of extensive revisions. When you think you have a decent draft, put it away for a time. Have patience while your subconscious toys with it. You’ll see your poem from a fresh point of view when you pull it out again. It may need only minor changes, a word added or cut here and there. Or you may want to restructure it, moving phrases around, pruning lines, perhaps recrafting free verse into rhymed or changing the viewpoint of the poem.

Say more with less.  Poetry is a precise and concentrated literary form. Think of paring the sun down to lightning. Eliminate the clutter in your poetry, the extraneous words and phrases. Challenge yourself to choose exactly the right words, no more and no less. Be specific. Does an airplane or a B-52 bomber hit the spot? Choose words that are strong, evocative and crisp.  Make your verbs active and your nouns precise. Use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. Ask yourself if each word and phrase is essential to the poem’s rhythm and imagery. Readers get lost when images expressed in a dozen words could have been expressed in two or three.

The poet details, the reader generalizes.  In other words, show, don’t tell. If your black Labrador always responds when you call him, talks to you with his eyes, plays Frisbee with abandon and runs with you while you train for marathons, show it in the dog's actions. The reader will generalize that your dog is faithful, expressive, playful, and energetic. Good writing is rich in detail.  Much of the fun of reading poetry and literature is in seeing through the author’s eyes and coming to one’s own conclusions.

Abstractions may be distractions.  Poets are inspired by the larger issues of life such as war, death, love, and peace. These abstractions are important, but are distant and difficult to relate to in poems that generalize them.  Draw upon your experiences using concrete and specific details. Write about a specific love relationship, the death of your friend, your experience in the Gulf War, or how your thoughts on news reports of current conflicts and reconciliations around the globe surface in your life. The easiest, immediate way to improve your poetry is to write what you know, filling your poetry with vivid physical images.

Sincerity wins.  Another common mistake of the beginning poet is writing in an assumed and artificial voice. Practice writing as you might speak to your closest friends and relatives. Devote a few minutes a day to free writing. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes. Keep your hand moving and ignore your internal censor.  What ends up on the page may not be perfect or grammatically correct, but is probably written in a natural voice. Experiment with weaving these journal entries into poems. You may discover your own voice by writing poems imitating the voices of famous poets, as a comedian does impressions. Or craft poems using dialogue with two or more characters speaking to get a feel for differences in voice.

Get the drift?  You know exactly what happened to you that long December night in 1981, but your reader doesn’t. Present your story in a clear and logical format.  As you write, the elements of your poem will all be there, but the order of lines or stanzas may need to be rearranged. On the other hand, perhaps you’ve been too stingy with words, and need additional detail to clarify what you’re trying to convey to the reader.

Are we on the same bus? You're taking the reader on a guided tour of your mind. Make the style and theme of your poem consistent. Does it sound as though it comes from one voice? If you use alternating voices in a poem, is the pattern recognizable to the reader? If you include a “turn” in your poetry, such as the emotional shift in Shakespearean sonnets, be sure that the body of your material has been well-developed enough to support a sudden change. Don’t leave your reader hanging, wondering where you have gone. 

Create a hook.  Just like the reporter or novelist, you need to capture your readers’ interest immediately.  The opening line of a poem sets the tone of the piece and needs to be interesting, powerful even. Ideally it will convey a striking image or emotion. Your opening line must encourage your audience to keep reading, because if it doesn’t, they won’t.

Set your line length.  No, not for fish, for emotional impact. Pick up an anthology of famous poets. Try rewriting their poems with lines of different length. Short, tight lines tend to lose their emotion and depth of meaning when lengthened, don’t they?  By the same token, the cathartic outpourings of longer lines lose their punch when shortened. Medium length lines allow a sort of neutral presentation without tension or drama.

Meaningful meter. Placement of accented syllables determines the rhythm of a poem. If the rhythmic sound of your poem doesn’t match its content, it won’t work.  Examine writing texts for a more thorough study of prosody, the study of meter, to brush up on your understanding of how to employ these rhythms in your poetry.

Care to stanza?  Stanzas can be manipulated as carefully as lines for maximum dramatic effect. These groupings of lines set scenes, as chapters do in a book, and create mood, pacing, and voice enhancement. They also serve as a design element on the page.  Might your poems be enhanced with changes of stanza?  For example, a complex poem with long phrases becomes lighter and more understandable when broken into couplets. A more fragile poem may work better as a single unit.  Study form poems and free verse poems by published poets to appreciate the effects that stanza patterns have on poetry.

 A rose by any other name. There are worthy poems around that were not published until they were given snappier titles. Though not as important as your first line or last line, a good title can spark interest in reading the poem. Titles may be descriptive of content, set a scene, or cleverly convey another layer of meaning. Be careful to not overdo a title, creating a hook that your poem can’t live up to. If you choose a suspense title, ground the poem in its scene or description as quickly as possible. Sometimes first lines or last lines are repeated as titles. This works well if the repetition enhances the content or the voice of the poem.

Close it with a bang.  Your last line should be as fresh and startling as your first. It may echo the first line, or it may resolve the poem’s situation. A closing line definitely should jar or satisfy the reader with a compelling image.  A trick that experienced poets use is laying the beginning and ending lines of a poem together. Is one stronger than the other? Do they counterbalance one another?

All poems great and small.  Poems are written in many styles – rhymed, unrhymed, narrative, lyric, dramatic, free verse – and forms – sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, haiku and many others. If you’re lucky, you have an intuitive gift for knowing what form enhances the content of your poem. Some poems must be drafted like a story and require quite a bit of work and concentration. The wrong structure for a poem can hurt its chances of publication, even when the content is wonderful. Beware of forced rhymes and greeting card sentiment. They may work well for your true love, but you won’t see them in poetry journals.

Consider the time spent creating timeless works of art and literature. Think of your poems as masterpieces in progress and don’t be afraid to spend quality time on them. With patience, persistence, and a bit of luck, you’ll find those envelopes coming back to you containing enthusiastic acceptances.

Kate is a published poet, creative nonfiction, feature and fiction writer who resides under the sunny and star-spangled skies of central Arizona. Her work is featured in AZ Tourist News, June Cotner’s prayer and poetry anthologies, Least Loved Beasts of the Really Wild West (Native West Press, 1997), Mediphors, Prescott Courier, South Ash Press, Sandcutters, Sunday Suitor, Threshold, I Love My Job! E-zine, thefictionwriter.com, writejourney.com and others.

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