Literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page, and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as English poet Ben Jonson said, poetry “utters somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way, which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax (the arrangement of words). -Britannica
Arc's Poem of the Year Shortlist (2024)
Part-Time Magic
by Jade Riordan
A part-time magician
taught me how to make balloon animals.
My hands have crafted horses,
their bones of air.
I have held the breath of the world
in the form of a bluebird.
By this, I mean the creation
of joy. I mean that I can create joy.
A golden balloon in my hand like a pillar
of light. A golden balloon in my hand
with the gentle intent
of becoming deer.
Loneliness is a solitary creature
deflating in the corner of the room;
its presence made small
and smaller still.
Small
and smaller still.
Part-time magic, part-time mundane—
this is the way of the living.
The wind in the wings
of a dragonfly. Sweeping the floor.
A red fox whispering sweet, green
nothings to the forest. Doing laundry.
The magician died young.
His lungs no longer ballooning
with the breath of the world. The memory
of golden deer held in our lonely hands.
Sometimes a bluebird is indistinguishable
from the sky.
| Good Poetry | Bad Poetry |
|---|---|
| Focuses on the Main Idea | Introducing too many ideas that detract from the principle point |
| Poems should tell a story It can be abstract or hard to decipher, but there should be some story woven in |
A lot of poems are based on the interpretation of the reader, if you can't see the story, neither can they |
| Emotion is the driving force behind a successful poem, they are a type of story after all | You have less time to make an emotional connection, so try to get them hooked by the first line |
|
It has visual imagery, descriptive language is a must. It's often why metaphors are often found in poems |
What you are presenting your readers should have a strong visual element, without it, the poem falls flat and the readers can't get attached |
| Only use words you need- most even say go back through your work and remove 10% of it | Poetry is usually short to begin with so keeping words to a minimum is often one of the hardest things to do while still keeping your works integrity |
| Your poem should have a nice flow, so read it aloud to yourself or to someone close to you and make sure it feels good to speak it out loud | It isn't easy getting a sense of flow when just reading in your mind, and if a poem doesn't flow it'll make the whole story hard to interoperate and understand |
| A poem should have consistent language which presents the main idea and that emotionally supports that idea without using unnecessary words. | There is no singular way a poem has to be written to be considered "good" as the content is more important than the form |
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To help with the flow, poems should have a decent rhythm. This can be achieved through the sounds of the letters, the number of syllables in the words, which syllables are stressed, and the length of the lines. |
Rhythm and rhymes are two separate things. While you can have poetry that rhymes, it is not a requirement and many famous poems have no rhyming at all, however, they all have a rhythm. |
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Making your words create vivid images in the reader's mind is what can really sell a poem. Describing what is going on in a few words to move your story along with emotion and clarity of the main point helps wrap everything together. |
Images show readers what’s happening rather than telling them. No one wants to hear an old man is sad; they want to see him struggling to hold back a sob and blinking away the tears in his eyes. |
Information gathered from The Letter Review and Writing Forward.
Here is a list of poem types from the Writer's Digest. Please note that some of these types are not considered "official" but are often used or have an alternative name for an already existing style (ex. Kimo is the Israeli version of a Haiku). Feel free to click the bolded purple titles to get full definitions of each style.
