3 features of bad poetry

Poetry is famously, absolutely and unequivocally subjective.

A poem can move one person to tears and leave another indifferent.
So by what standard can we judge some poetry to be bad? How do we define bad? And should we?

People who say all poetry is valid are correct. People who say that we can’t tell if a poem is good or bad are wrong. People who advocate we shouldn’t even judge are delusional.

Think of it like this. Just about everyone can run. Running is a healthy thing, free for everyone to participate in and life-affirming. But there’s a big difference between a child dashing between trees, a middle-aged mother jogging to tone and shift some pounds, and a sleek Olympic-medalled middle-distance runner.

Everyone can, and possibly should, write poetry; but some people are just better at it than others. We can all spot doggerel and bland, shallow, pointless, derivative verse. It’s often what great poets write in their youth before they hone their craft, learn from life, and do better.

It’s true that personal preference plays a role. A poem can be measurably good, but not to your tastes. The fact you don’t like it, doesn’t make it a bad poem. Inevitably, there will be thousands of poems that simply do not speak to you, because poetry is subjective.

And all of this speaks to our purpose at the Bad Poet Society, which is not simply to point out bad poetry, nor just to help readers spot and articulate why a poem is bad, but also to help would-be poets get better. This modern day, lazy habit of saying that everything is equally valid prevents improvement. It also results from a lack of honesty. Some things simply are better than others and, as humans, we should strive to improve and do better.

We are not apologists for the mundane or the pedestrian at the Bad Poet Society. We want to read better poetry and so point out in this article, and later ones in the series, the features that make poetry measurably bad. This is not about invalidating the feelings that lead to the poetic urge; it’s about helping you express those feelings better, so that your creation soars into the canon of great English words.

BAD POETRY FEATURE #1: LACK OF AUTHENTICITY

We all have a tale of our first encounter with really bad poetry. Mine was a dear friend who shared her collection of poems with me, most earnestly. She modestly hesitated at the point of handing them over, before thrusting them decisively into my hands. It was entirely unconsensual. I hadn’t agreed to read her poetry, but read it I would, because she had decided to share herself with me.

She was a nice woman. Very intelligent. But I soon discovered her poetry was dreadful. It stunk. It was so dreadful that even today I sometimes finding myself laughing and shuddering (luddeirng?) at the thought of it.

Her great mistake was to write about things she had never experienced, and it was painfully obvious. These were things she was interested in or felt she should write about – such as loss, pain and yearnings – but she had experienced little of life other than a comfortable middle class upbringing. She didn’t understand pain and had never missed anything. Her poetry taught me a great lesson – authenticity is everything. Good poetry is distilled emotion or experience expressed in resonant words that affect the reader; bad poetry is comprised of clever words used to express a shallow, fake or unlived experience. It is artistically flaccid and the difference is profound.

You cannot think yourself into being a war poet. You cannot write vivid and terrifying poems about war if you haven’t seen its horrors first hand – like Wilfred Owen did. You can write about why war is bad and to be avoided; you can write about your own tangential relationship to war (and someone affected by it in some way). But don’t write a war poem as though you were actually there if you weren’t. That is not just stolen valour, or experiential appropriation, it’s also likely to be horribly stereotyped.

Instead, start with your own experiences, thoughts and life. Write poetry from your own experience and perspective. In prose you have much more leaway for fiction, but in something as distilled and concerned with emotion as poety, you must bare your own soul and not someone else’s.

BAD POETRY FEATURE #2: LACK OF RHYTHM

One of my exes confided in me on our second date that he was ‘totally unrhythmical’. I should have heeded the warning.

Poetry, like music, needs rhythm – whether you are reading it aloud or inside your head. The regularity of a poem’s rhythm is metre, a measured beat established by syllabic patterns. This serves a similar function to the bass in music, a repeated pattern – sometimes varied – that drives the poem forward.

Ezra Pound noted that modern poets ‘compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’. But this is a misunderstanding of the very form of poetry. Even prose absolutely must have a harmonious phrasing, but the whole point of poetry is constraint – fewer words and a rhythm that makes the piece memorable.

Good poems dance, light on their feet; bad poems stagger like drunkards from one cliché to the next. Disrespect metre and you end up with the Tay Bridge Disaster.

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

_{Extract from Tay Bridge Disaster, William McGonagall, 1879}

Poetic rhythm and metre are important because, as many modern poets and critics forget, poetry is NOT a written medium – it’s meant to be spoken aloud. This is its history, what it’s designed to do. And the rhythm and rhyme serve the function of making it easier to remember for both speaker and audience. Even Anglo-Saxon poetry, which didn’t use end-rhyme, employed alliteration to the same effect and had its own metres. If you’re writing poetry to be read in someone’s head, you’re doing it wrong. Which is why poetic word art is frankly stupid. If you have to see a poem to understand it, it isn’t a poem.

BAD POETRY FEATURE #3: EGOTISM

We live in the age of ego, so it’s hardly surprising that one of the poxes of modern poetry is its self-obsession. Poets today are not trying to transport you to an opium-inspired dream, or understand the truths and emotions they discovered as a result of experiencing life. All too often, today’s poets lack the humour, wide reading or deep thinking of previous generations of poets.

The blame for the poor state of poetry can be laid quite firmly on the doorstep of inclusion – anyone can be a poet, or so they argue. I agree. They can be a poet, but that’s not the issue. The issue is should they be a poet?

To be a good poet you need to invoke a response from readers. A feeling, an impression, an aha moment through your sublime use of words. Anyone can write a song, but should they? Most people can’t sing, let alone compose something that others want to hum. Children can draw but they’re not Leanardo da Vinci. True poets slave over their poems for years to achieve perfection; modern poets dash them off over coffee for today’s Instagram post.

The truth is that we’re all meant to be readers of poetry: we shouldn’t all fancy ourselves writers of poetry. Writing a diary doesn’t make you a novelist any more than confessional, self-absorbed, narrative poetry doesn’t make you a poet.

None of this is helped by the a general unwillingness to give or take criticism. We are told that all writing is equally valid (it isn’t). We are told that work that is shallow, vain and badly written is about individualism (it may be individual but it’s still bad). Bad poetry might be Instagram famous for a day or two, but it will not be something people come back to in 10 years, let alone 100.

For that you need to learn the craft of poetry and put together words that evoke emotion in your readers, not pour your own emotions onto them carelessly. Describing your feelings doesn’t mean your readers relate to them, feel them, or are moved by them. Compare these two:

I understand death now. It’s isolating.

My mother died today and left me all alone.

We understand the first example intellectually. The second example we understand emotionally. We all have a mother and she means something to us for good or bad, and we imagine her death within those words. We’re also haunted by the idea of abandonment and loneliness, and so the second example induces or reminds us of those feelings.

If you want to get out of the ego trap, you have to think about the effect your words will have on your audience. If you don’t, they will not read or buy your poetry and you are doomed to starve in an attic and be forgotten, your poetry yesterday’s chip paper. Get out of your head and into your heart and feelings; then consider how your feelings and experience reveal universal truths that help you connect with your readers.

In This Be The Verse, the modernist Philip Larkin rejects the form of Victorian poetry, but reveals his mastery of colloquial language, irony and a deep understanding of the often meloncholically bleak realities of life. His metre is faultless, constraining and inescapable, because it reflects the stifling constraints of most people’s lives.

And here we have another lesson. Readers have expectations of our writing deeply embedded in their souls, learnt in the cradle. Expectation of metre, authenticity and emotional resonance. Which is why rap sells and blank verse doesn’t. It’s why novels based on one of the common narrative structures filled with variations of well-known archetypes become best sellers.

If you can’t distil your message into poetic form, using rhythm to add a layer of meaning to your words, then maybe what you have is something else – a short story or an essay, perhaps. But if you’re going to write random words, strangely spaced with no punctuation, and try to convince us this is superior to both the great poets of the past and by AI-generated verse, brace yourself to be forgotten.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.

_{Extract from This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin, 1971
In this poem, Larkin doesn’t self-indulgently dwell on his bad childhood, but uses direct language and a precise, regular rhythm to convey the cyclical and inevitable nature of bad parenting and bad experiences of parenting. The constraint of the metre emphasises just how hard this cycle is to escape.}

In our next article we’ll look at three more features of bad writing.