By Jennifer Boire  »  There are many aspects that make a poem written in free verse work as a poem, without strict adherence to rhyme and metre. One aspect is the sound, the musicality, and the word choice, creating a rhythm that is not prose-like. But that doesn’t explain the whole picture. Poems are also about meaning and mood.  Poetry is made with layered imagery that speaks volumes, that evokes as much as describes, and grabs our attention. 

The musicality is more and more important to me. Irving Layton called it ‘making music out of words”.

Otherwise, why did the poet choose to write a poem and not an essay or a short story? There needs to be a strong sound component - without rhythm, rhyme or musicality (through repetition, alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme) a poem doesn’t sing. Just as importantly, the images and word choice in a poem need to move us beyond flat prosaic style.

Without layers of meaning built on fresh, surprising images and metaphor or symbols, poetry is just a bunch of lazy, unstructured words piled up in a thin column on the left side of the page, using statements and emotions without any attempt to shape or prune the language.  

One of my best teachers used to call for the Samurai sword when editing our poems. He wanted us to be ruthless in cutting out any redundant words, to pare the poem down to the heart of the matter, the core.

A poem means more than it says. A poet feels things strongly, expresses what he or she feels in dense, compressed form, and pays attention to the atmosphere created by the images, to the mood or energy, the movement of a piece.  One short poem can give you the same insight or understanding as a ten page short story.  There is also the ‘mystery element’ of feeling – a good poem touches you in the heart, makes you want to read it again, as you wonder just where the poet inserted that extra level of understanding without you noticing. When the language is really working, it attracts the eye, the ear, and the heart and soul. 

Margaret Atwood said poetry is denser than prose (I can’t find the direct quote)....she does say of Margaret Avison’s poetry that “she pares her works to the core and throws out all extraneous and diluting verbal peelings....a highly condensed poetic texture which demands a lot of conscious concentration on the part of the reader.” (Second Words) That is a good place to start – throw out the peelings....

Sometimes, students who are new to writing poetry write socially or politically aware poems, that raise questions or seek to bring understanding and make sense of things, but the language used is conventional or stale, cliché ridden or full of expository statements. It doesn’t rise above mere description or ranting; it doesn’t rise to ‘poetry’.  Words like Justice, Love and Death, violence and beauty...are abstract concepts. 

Young writers are seeking ways to express their confusion, their alienation or just plain dejection at the state of the world of school, unfaithful friends, politics, family, injustice. They are eager to point out society’s faults, the lack of integration of immigrants, the homeless, poverty, and abuses of power.  They have strong emotion on their side. But they need help with choosing  the precision of specific, concrete words to express those abstract concepts. 

How to make a polemic into a poem? Michael Morolla has an excellent essay on youngpoets.ca which gives a big hint, to help a poem paint a thousand pictures:

“So how does one explain the difference between an effective poem and one that fails to “grab” the reader or listener? One answer: The strength and effectiveness of a poem relies on the strength and effectiveness of its imagery – and the strength and effectiveness of that imagery relies on its concreteness. In fact, real imagery can’t help but be concrete. As defined on the VolWeb Project site of The University of Tennessee, imagery “is the use of vivid description, usually rich in sensory words, to create pictures, or images, in the reader's mind.” Call it a form of communication that uses words to create pictures. However, even that definition lacks one important element – and that’s the avoidance of clichéd descriptions.”  Michael Morolla. From his essay, Keep it simple, concrete imagery, on youngpoets.ca. (italics and bolds mine)

In other words, there should be a sense of surprise, of discovery or freshness to the words chosen. When the words seem overused, it’s like you’ve heard it before, it’s cliché – it has lost its meaning; ‘cute as a button’ is one – it may have had an impact the first few times it was used, but fifty years later, when we hear cute as....we automatically hear ‘button’ coming. Words need to find energy in new combinations. A good poet stays away from abstract terms, blanket statements, words like ‘love’ ‘truth’ ‘comfort’. Don’t write about ‘winter’ but about ‘the time you froze your toes off tobogganing until the stars outshone the sun”.

As in any style of writing, the basic tools for good poetry are the five senses, the specific, concrete engagement with the rich world around us through our body/mind/spirit. How does it sound, smell, taste, look, feel?

Another way of looking at a poem is at its effect on you. One of my favourite poetry critics, Robyn Sarah, puts it this way in her essay Poetry’s Bottom Line. If she  remembers it individually from a body of poems,  or wants to say it out loud, for the sheer pleasure of the sounds the words make, or if she has the impulse to learn it "by heart” –or to share it – or if it makes her  want to write a poem herself, she finds it worthy of being called poetry. That seems a very subjective way of judging a poem, but then, poetry is a subjective art.

Her list of what makes something ‘not poetry’ is illuminating as well: “...Of this much I am convinced:  the poetry of poetry, the "goodness" of good poetry, does not reside in beautiful or bizarre images, fine phrasemaking, artful mystification, esoteric allusion, linguistic mirror tricks, fractured syntax, anecdotal appeal, gorgeous description, prurient confession, political missions, social consciousness, academic research, exoticism, topicality, or pick-a-backing on the lives and works of the famous dead. ...I believe that a true poem, whatever its subject or style, has a density of meaning, a felicity of language and an authenticity of feeling that cannot be faked – a  mysterious synthesis that doesn't happen every time a poet picks up a pen, but is born of some urgency of the moment.  It's a synthesis devoutly to be wished, but one that cannot be willed.  A true poem has a voice one can trust –a distinctive voice, utterly its own, one that is unaware of audience.”  (bold mine)

Poetry is an art form that requires skill. So let’s encourage young poets to take risks, to increase their word hoards, to dance on the high wire of poetic language using the balancing rods of devices such as alliteration, assonance, rhythm, half-rhyme, internal rhyme, metaphor, and simile. 

A good poem triggers emotion, understanding, empathy, recognition, and creates a lasting impression. It is not a list of haphazard emotions slapped down on the page just the way it came out. A poem must have as much life as a mosquito, as one of Canada’s most revered poets, Irving Layton taught us at Concordia University a few years ago. So how much buzzzz does your poem have?

• Jennifer Boire is a Montreal poet and teacher of creative journaling workshops. She blogs at www.questinggirl.blogspot.com