How to write bad poetry

Hi, folks. Today, I want to talk to you about bad poetry, because I’ve been reading a lot of it.

Now, you might already know that I run a book blog called SocialBookshelves.com. I get sent a lot of books to review, by a mixture of independent authors and internationally-renowned writers, and I work with everyone from PR agents and publicists to authors, managers and more.

I’m also one of the few bloggers who’s willing to read and review poetry. I read a lot of poetry, because I write a lot of poetry – in fact, my debut collection of poetry, Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home, was published by Booktrope in March of this year. I like to think I know a lot about it – at least, as much as anyone else does.

Which got me to thinking about bad poetry – what is it about some types of poetry that leaves a bad taste in my mouth? And then I realised, that there are a few different things that keep on cropping up:

#1: Forced rhyming structures: Nothing grinds my gears like poetry which is written to sound like poetry. Now, I don’t mind rhyming poetry, if it’s done well – what I don’t like is when someone writes a piece of rhyming poetry and forces rhymes by writing clunky sentences.

#2: Cliché: A lot of people write poems about what they think poems should be about – love and roses and shit. Poetry should be exciting and relatable – if it doesn’t tick both of these boxes then it’s just going to be overlooked in a sea of sameness.

#3: Passive voice: Always write in the active voice – ‘subject verb object‘, not ‘object verb subject‘. ‘John ate the ice cream’, and not ‘the ice cream was eaten by John’. Passive voice sucks and tends to make the poetry more wordy – with poetry, it’s more important than ever to be as succinct as possible.

For now, those are the three main things that I’ve spotted that keep on cropping up in bad poems, but this fits on top of all of the usual rules of writing. Just because you’re writing poetry, it doesn’t mean that the same rules of writing apply. Be smart, people – poetry is hard enough to sell as it is. Don’t make it even harder by writing bad work.