Bad Poetry

I started writing poems when I was just about a teenager. I wrote nearly a thousand poems from the time I was a teenager to the time I started working. Then I looked back, appalled at about 99.5% at what I'd written. I think only about five of those poems were any good to me.

But how did I decide they were 'good' or 'bad'?

I think that when you look at a poem you've written, it's hard not to think about it in the personal context in which you wrote it. Quite apart from that, though, if a poem creates a fresh personal context when you read it — if it makes a new landscape, if it shifts your perspectives, if it makes you think thoughts you'd never thought before — then it has fulfilled what I think is one criterion of 'good'. This is all hard to evaluate if it's your own poem.

Another, more technical, criterion is the idea of whether you could think of better ways to express a given thought. If you can think of many such ways, then either you have missed the point of the poem or the poet's word choice was not 'good' to you. I cringe at some of my attempts because I was hopelessly clumsy with language in some of them.

Sometimes, technical expertise can be found in the way words are used to evoke qualities like atmosphere, mood, pace, tone and style. You can tell when you're reading Auden or Hopkins, Blake or Milligan, Kipling or Chesterton. If you can parody a poet, he must be good in the sense of sufficiently exact expression to convey at least his core character. It is this I find lacking in much of my early poetry — it wasn't me, it was someone else I was imitating.

I became a much better poet after I stopped trying to use poetry as a weapon or a tool. I think some of my best poetry came late in life, a clear indicator that I'll never be a 'good' poet. But at least, I don't think I'm such a 'bad' one anymore. I'm also quite aware that all this is subjective to a large extent. That doesn't worry me.