what makes a poem good?

HarryHill said:

I always liked this one
< click here

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butters said:

thanks for bumping this, annie - what a trip down memory lane, and some names we may never see post again

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pleasure of impaled flesh
and quaking bone

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SimonDoom said:

Wow, this thread has been around for a while.

I've only been on Literotica for about a year and a half, and only recently submitted my first poem.

My take on what makes a poem good:

First of all, there's no formula. Really good poetry may follow conventions we're familiar with, but ultimately there's something about a great poem that defies convention or easy description. You can say "A great poem must have X," but if you dig deep you can find many poems that don't have X at all. So everything anyone says about what makes a poem great (including me) needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

That said, this in my opinion is what makes a poem good:

1. A sense of words. Regardless of whether a poet works with standard rhyming conventions or ignores them, a good poet has a sense of the rhythm and musicality of words. You see this right away when you read a good poem versus a bad poem. You can hear it when you read a poem out loud.

2. A sense of originality and strangeness. A great poem says something in a different way, often in a way that's startling or disturbing. It doesn't rely on cliche. This is a very hard thing to do, but great poets pull words out from deep places inside them and put them together in ways we haven't seen before.

3. Something to say. That doesn't mean a Deep Statement On The Human Condition. It can be a small point, but one that hits the reader as one worth making. Often good poems start with small points and end by demonstrating that the small point is more important than you might have thought at first.

4. An aptitude for metaphor. This ties in to number 2. Good poetry often makes a point indirectly. "Shall I compare thee to a summer day?" Is an example. The poet makes his/her point figuratively rather than directly. This is a hard thing to do in a way that is both original but also convincing.

5. A talent for compression. Poetry, more than prose, is dense. It says more with fewer words, and each word is loaded with meaning. A really good poem usually (but not always) combines message, rhythm, music, metaphor in relatively few words. When it's done effectively you can't help but be impressed with the artfulness of it.

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