What Makes a Short Poem Good?
A poem - albeit short
What makes a short poem good?
Simplicity
That’s it. That’s all there is. The shortest poem I ever wrote. I wrote it when trying to answer the actually question the title posed. I’d written a few short poems and a friend asked me, what makes them good? Not in a disparaging way, she liked the short poems and was musing aloud. She couldn’t work out how to write short poems herself, struggled with Haikus, disliking a limited word/syllable limit. I liked poetry at uni and no one else seemed to. I used to write the poetry coursework for others, giving them my cast offs and telling them to change a few words. I kept the best for myself of course. I loved playing with words, using them in, what was for me unusual, ways, though they probably weren’t very original. Sometimes you need to reinvent the wheel yourself rather than being immediately unique. I’m not that innately gifted I could skip that part of the learning curve. I played around with form, adding pictures and even adding maths formulas. Nothing earth shatteringly new, I’m sure, but it sure amused me.
I’ve always preferred poetry to prose. Prose is harder for me, I prefer the conciseness of poetry. For me using a very specific word in a very specific way in a very specific place and often only over a hundred words or so (I have written longer and shorter). Prose has SO many words and fussing over every one takes so much time. It doesn’t come as easily. Considering my degree was English Literature and Education I really didn’t dissect text well. I struggled with understanding the meaning behind the words. When the teacher would say x used the word ‘blue’ to mean something other than blue I really struggled to understand how they knew. Maybe blue was just the writers favourite colour. Despite my ned to get the right word for poetry I couldn’t use inference nor deduction to understand the hidden inner meanings to the great authors we read. Why couldn’t/shouldn’t blue just mean blue and not sadness, or beauty, or clarity, or cold. And how on earth was I supposed to work it all out. Obviously looking back now under the veil of autism it is obvious why I struggled with this. it just wasn’t obvious to me. there have been questions raised as to why I did English Literature rather than Maths or Science, but for me it was simple. I adored reading, I loved writing, stories were an escape I treasured. I entered an English degree with rather a large amount of naivety and somehow stumbled through to completion. My strengths were children’s writing, poetry, exploring etymology, myths etc., my weaknesses explaining what a dusty author meant by certain, often also dusty, passages of text. Ask me to write poetry in the form of the Oresteia and I excelled. Ask me why the author used the word ‘blue’ instead of ‘sapphire’ and nine times out of ten I got the answer wrong.
There are of course times when the words abandon me and I find even a short poem hard to finish. especially now with my ME and limited energy. However, I do often think of them in the wee small hours when insomnia bugs me. I rarely write anything down though, a habit I’ve never managed yet to cultivate, and by the morning I can only remember a few phrases and often not the good ones. These ghosts of poems often follow me around for days before either dissipating or working themselves onto a piece of paper (or nowadays to the electronic screen). Partial poems frozen in a state of half birth, I tend to forget about them after a while. I suppose I really should go back and rescue them at some point.
Are people interested in how poems come about? What the intent behind writing them is? Why one word is chosen over another? Let me know, cos that was one hell of a ramble for a simple one word poem. Lol.
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All poems and writing copyright T. Chennell 2024