The things most likely to derail a poem: Sealey Challenge 2023 wrap-up

I’m pleased to announce that I successfully completed the challenge of reading a poetry collection every day during the month of August. My gold seal should be on its way to me shortly.

One of my main goals in taking up this challenge was to develop a better understanding of what I do and don’t enjoy in poetry, and this challenge definitely helped me do that. I made it a point to read widely, both in terms of poets and styles. So the collections I read ranged from self-published works to literary award winners. Some collections leaned more toward a “writerly” style, while others sang more when read out loud.

On average, I tended to enjoy the collections that were traditionally published by established poets. However, this wasn’t true for all of them. There were a few award-winning poets, including one collection that had won a literary award, that I didn’t care for. However, I could usually see the skill and craft that went into them.

On the other hand, a lot of the self-published stuff came across as amateurish, sometimes to the point of making me angry. That said, I also found a couple of hidden gems. So what are the marks of an amateur in poetry? I’m sure there are many, but I noticed two recurring issues in my reading that significantly decreased my enjoyment of a poet’s work.

Problem 1: lack of rhythm

The first is awkward rhythm. This mostly came up in poems that kind of tried to stick to a particular meter but didn’t quite achieve it. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but if you’re going to play with meter, it needs to feel intentional. Shakespeare did this all the time, but he usually had a purpose for doing so. Let’s look at one of his most famous lines from Hamlet:

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

This line has an extra syllable beyond the iambic pentameter that Shakespeare is known for, but it serves a larger purpose of both conveying the uncertainty Hamlet feels and unsettling the reader a bit.

In contrast, The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall, dubbed “the worst poem ever written” by Mental Floss, has an inconsistent meter and rhyme scheme that don’t feel mindful, just lazy. The poem opens:

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last sabbath day of 1879

Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

Can you tell me what meter McGonagall is using here? I don’t have a clue.

A website called KeyToPoetry attempts to analyze this poem and many others in a quantitative fashion, attempting to infer meter, rhyme schemes, and more from the text. Even the data bears out the structural confusion. If we look at their analysis of Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats (chosen as a poem of comparable length), we can see that even quantitatively, Keats’s work was much tighter than McGonagall’s.

Problem 2: not doing enough with the material

The rhythm issue tends to come up, as I previously mentioned, with poets trying to write in a particular meter. But of course, much of the poetry being published today is free verse, i.e., it has no fixed meter. Free verse poems still have their own rhythm, but readers are likely to tolerate wider variations in that area. If there was a free verse poem I disliked in my reading, it was usually because I felt like the poet didn’t do enough with the material.

What do I mean when I say that? In my notes for one collection, I wrote that it read like “diary entries with line breaks.” And that’s fine as a starting point. I listened to an interview with a recently-published poet who said that a lot of poems in the collection started out as blog posts that she reviewed and added line breaks to them. The key is, she didn’t stop there. There was a lot more editing, getting feedback from her fellow poets, etc. that happened before the collection was ready for publication. A few of the collections I read felt like they just added the line breaks to their diary entries and stopped there.

Editing seems to get a bad rap in creative circles these days, but it has its purpose. The trick is not to write and edit at the same time. And if publication is your goal, eventually you’ll want to get feedback on your work, ideally from someone more knowledgeable and experienced than you. One of the best pieces I’ve ever written online was substantially improved by an editor’s work.

Conclusion

I learned a lot doing this challenge, and I hope to do it again next year. But if I do that, I’m going to start my planning much earlier than I did this year. There will be no dipping into self-published collections on Amazon next year.