The Beginning Poet's Quickstart Guide: 4 Lyrical Principles for Writing Poetry

Poetry can be an intimidating thing to get into—so let’s get you started with 4 basic principles to get you on your way to writing better poems. 

Welcome to the show, it’s good to see you—and I’m excited that you’re interested in writing some poetry. As you might know, poetry has a long history, so there have been a lot of people voicing a lot of opinions about poetry for a very long time—which means that there’s a lot of stuff out there that could distract you from what’s most important when writing poetry. 

You know, not everything you can do with a poem is something you must or should do with a poem—some elements of poetry are more essential than others. Focus on those, and your poetry will be so much the better for it. 

A lot of us have common early experiences with poetry that set us up with the wrong expectations, which means we end up doing some unfortunate things when we first set out to be poetic. 

So, before we get to the basic things you probably should prioritize in your poetry, let’s talk about some common things that aren’t going to help you. 

Of course, we love your black beret—but that’s not necessary for writing poetry. Wear it if you want to, but don’t do it just because you feel like you have to. And it could probably go without saying that nobody’s going to take you seriously if you’re talking to a skull. 

Kaput: Excuse me? If anything, talking to you weakens my credibility...

Oh, all right then. But, more importantly, our first experiences with poetry usually happen in school—and usually involve poems that are hundreds of years removed from anyone in the class. When we read Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth, we might get the idea that poetry should sound old fashioned, but it’s worth remembering that their poetry didn’t sound old fashioned to them—it was now fashioned back then. So just write in the language you know—you and your readers live in the twenty-first century, so your poetry probably should too.

Also, in school, you might feel like you have a hard time understanding poetry—or at least, a hard time understanding poems in the same way that your teacher expects you to. So you might have the idea that poetry is a complicated way of saying anything but what you mean to say or that a poet’s job is to keep secrets in order to make themself look smart and to make their readers feel inadequate while a select few who “get it” can show off their interpretive genius. 

But I think flattering your intellect or someone else’s is a rather poor motive for writing poetry. So let go of the pressure to be obscure, mysterious, and intellectual. It’s the obscure, mysterious, and intellectual poets who have ruined the fun for the rest of us—no need to follow them down their dark path.

And, of course, your poetry doesn’t have to rhyme—lots of poems don’t. It doesn’t have to have a set meter—lots of poems don’t. Besides, I’ve seen meter cause a lot of avoidable issues. Do it if it speaks to you, but don’t worry about it if you’re just starting out. Oh, and don’t feel like a poem has to be center aligned. Left alignment is far more common and generally much easier to read. 

Okay—so now that we’ve let go of some of our cultural poetic baggage, we know what we don’t have to worry about, but that doesn’t get us any closer to what we should focus on—so what should your poem do? Well, I’m glad you asked.

The overwhelming majority of poems written in the last hundred years or so are what we would call lyrical poems—they don’t really exist to tell stories or process ideas in highly intellectual ways. Instead, lyricism comes from experiencing a situation, feeling overpowering emotion, recognizing deeply affecting human complexity in response and then writing to try to awaken those feelings in the minds and hearts of a reader. When we write poems, our goal is communicate an experience through words more than it is to tell a story or transmit an idea. 

And, where lyricism is the goal, there are four things we can do that will help us to get there. And the first of those priorities is Novelty.

I took a few poetry classes in college, and I can still hear my professor commenting on our work in class, sometimes calling our phrases or ideas familiar. And that familiarity, I should point out, was never treated as a good thing. In the years since, I’ve taught my fair share of beginning poets, and I’ve had the same feeling: a poem that says things I’ve heard before about things I’ve seen before just isn’t that interesting. 

Kaput: I could think of a few more things that aren’t that interesting…

Well, instead, we can build stronger foundation for our poems when we build them with novelty in mind. And that might sound daunting at first—but take courage in knowing that you already have a big advantage on that front by virtue of being a unique human being with unique experiences and perspectives. 

I think the trouble is that a lot of new poets, in an effort to write poems that are “relatable” end up writing poems that are bland, generic, and overly familiar—the kind of poems that anyone could have written and that don’t really offer us any kind of unique or interesting insight. 

Life can be awfully dull and monotonous at times, and a good poem serves to wake us up and shake us out of the routine. You might hear people praise poems for their freshness or for defamiliarizing their subjects. Whatever they call it, readers of poetry are generally looking for the gift of seeing some aspect of the world in a new way. 

So you could look for totally new things to write about, but it’s probably much more manageable to find new ways to write about common things. Anyone can write a winter poem about softly falling snow or a love poem about roses or a nostalgic poem about your grandmother’s cookies—but what if you wrote a winter poem about walking through a rainy park far from home and missing the snow or a love poem about a painting called Insect Comedy that you saw on a first date to an art museum or a nostalgic poem about sneaking an extra piece of pie before dinner with your grandfather’s help. 

Because those poems are about unique, specific experiences that only you could write about, they’re already fresher and more novel. They offer a reader something that that reader hasn’t already seen a hundred times before. 

But even if you’re writing about something familiar, your own perspective can create something new. The first time I read Aram Saroyan’s poem “Paradise,” I had never thought about how “nuts look like wood but taste good” but now I think about it every time I see an almond, peanut, or cashew. So lean into your unique experiences and your unique perspective on common experiences—and you’ll be way ahead on the lyricism game. 

William Carlos Williams famously said that there should be no ideas but in things and Archibald MacLeish wrote that a poem should offer, “For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf.” In both cases, we get the poetic priority of Imagery. Poems should be built not out of ideas and concepts but out of sensory experiences, commonly known as images. 

You can’t imagine discouragement—that’s just an idea. But you can imagine someone waiting to cross the street in a rainstorm, the wind throwing water in their face while they wonder what’s taking so long. And, when you imagine someone in that situation, you can get a better handle on what discouragement must feel like. And that’s the power of image. 

People like to give poets grief for not just saying what they mean. Just get to the point and move on—what’s all this extra stuff for? Well, if you’re writing a memo to the CEO, brief abstract summaries probably serve their purpose. But, remember, poets are in the business of communicating experiences—and getting readers to feel what the poet felt in the moment. 

So why, in Ted Kooser’s poem “After Years” do we have to watch a glacier fall into the sea, watch an oak fall in the Cumberlands, and witness a sun thirty five times the size of our own sun explode and vanish if all he wanted to tell us was that he saw someone he used to love and really shook him up? 

Just say what you mean! Get to the point!

Because “getting to the point” and just saying “I saw that person and it shook me up” would be to miss the point. If we read that, we might say, sorry to hear it buddy. But, instead, when we read that seeing an old love from a distance felt like a whole glacier falling into the sea, an ancient oak collapsing in the woods, and a gigantic star exploding, only to be witnessed by a little astronomer who has nobody to tell—then we don’t just hear about Ted Kooser’s experience—we get a chance to feel what it was like too. 

Images are things that connect to our senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch—and they give us a chance to experience a poem instead of just hear about it. A lot of beginning poets can get stuck on the ideas, the concepts—grief, love, embarrassment—and they end up writing poems that raise some interesting ideas but don’t really offer any interesting experiences. The result is that, in the end, a reader might say, “Oh, interesting,” but they don’t get a chance to fully feel what it was like. 

So, as a second priority—focus on imagery, on setting the scene, engaging the senses, and letting readers experience the poem rather than just hear about it—by doing that, you’ll amplify the emotional effect of your poem. 

Speaking of the emotional effect of your poem, it’s also common to see new poets write poems that offer lots of interesting images  about a unique or novel subject but that also don’t really seem to have anything at all to say. They’re kinda nice and pretty, but they aren’t much more than that. 

Kaput: I’ve got nice and pretty covered—if only you could figure out how to say something interesting, bud…

Now I’ve said before that I think the question “what does this poem mean?” is the wrong question. Poems aren’t riddles, and the goal of reading a poem isn’t to crack the code and find the answer. A much better question to ask is “what makes this poem meaningful?” Why does it matter? 

Nobody has to write a poem. Lots of people never write poems and live perfectly acceptable lives. But you did a write a poem—you wrote this poem. So, of all the poems in the whole wide world that you could have written, why did you write this one? What was it about this experience you had or observation you made that was so meaningful that you wanted to put it in a poem and share it with someone else? 

I’ve worked with a lot of poets who, for whatever reason, feel the need to keep themselves and their feelings out of the poems they write. So, instead of seeing how the poet looked at dried seeds still clinging to tree branches in early spring and felt like their own life was a disappointing failure to fly out into the world and grow into a powerful tree, we just see some seeds. And they’re lovely seeds, but we don’t know why they matter. What makes those seeds so meaningful to the poet—and what makes them meaningful for us? 

At this point, we’re talking about including a sense of investment in the poem, maybe something like what the poet Richard Hugo calls stance. As you write the poem, you do so with a stance or orientation toward your subject—you feel some way about it (otherwise you wouldn’t be writing about it), so make it clear to the reader. 

Because remember, when we read and write poems, we’re reminding each other that there are other people out there, living life, and dealing with all the same stuff we deal with. By and large, people aren’t reading your poem because they’re fascinated by frozen dandelions or oily spaghetti or blackberry bushes—they’re reading your poem because they want to connect with the human being on the other end. And those dandelions, spaghetti, and blackberries serve as the means of connection. 

Meaningfulness comes through the speaker’s stance toward the details—not the details themselves. If you’ll indulge me in a little rhetorical theory

Kaput: I think it’d be better if you didn’t…think about viewer retention…

No, this one’s good, it’ll be fine. Anyway, Lloyd Bitzer once wrote that “the experiential world presents to us many weighted or personal facts which are what they are because our participation gives them a status and invests them with a value they would not otherwise enjoy"

In other words, the details of your poem don’t mean much by themselves. The details of your poem become meaningful when we get to see evidence of your attitude toward them. Make it clear why the things you’re writing about are meaningful to you, and it will be much easier for your reader to find what makes them meaningful for them. 

And finally we get to a fourth fundamental priority of poetry—and, maybe, of these four the one that you should worry least about at the start. This is something to practice and work toward—but if you focus too much on it at the start, you run the risk of getting yourself stuck—and that’s compression. 

Poets prize conveying as much as they can in the fewest, most precise words possible. Ted Kooser has said that the difference between a mere anecdote and a poem is that the writer puts more pressure on a poem, and compression is a key way of applying some pressure. 

So, after you’ve written a draft of poem, your next task is to go through and see where you can make it shorter, where you can express the same ideas in fewer words. Poetry is meant to be highly concentrated language—every word should be putting in some real work, and anything that isn’t needs to go.

For example, you could write something lofty and poetic like:

The great, big fiery orb of our close-neighboring star arcs upward into the open blue sky. 

But check this out—we have some impressive and interesting language here, but how many of these words are actually doing any heavy lifting?

Great and big cover really similar ground—why would we need both? Besides that, these words describe a star—and stars are famously big, fiery and round, so do we really need to point out those qualities? Not only that, but neighbors are typically close—and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a pretty simple word for the star closest to us…not to be that guy, but why not just use that perfectly good word that has all these meanings baked into it already? Similarly, the sky is pretty well known for being open and blue—and there’s not really anywhere for the sun to arc upward into, and, once again, arc upward is two words where rises is one. 

So why not just say the Sun rises? 

That first sentence is the kind of thing that happens, I think, when we’re trying to be poetic—and it’s also why people give poets a hard time for being pretentious and talking around their point. Why say all of this when what you mean is the sun rose—just say that. 

And that’s a fair point—and the point of compression. Don’t multiply words just because you can—focus on conveying your meaning in as few words as possible. 

Of course, this is an exaggerated example. The first sentence is not only overly wordy, but it’s not terribly interesting in terms of novelty, fairly redundant in terms of imagery, and not all that interesting in terms of stance. 

Something like “That amber disk sags behind the Rockies’ shadowy jaw,” however, is a lot more wordy than the sun set, but it’s also doing more to make the scene strange and new, to be evocative and specific, and to set the tone with a little bit of the speaker’s sense of foreboding. It’s a line with more words—but these are words are putting in a lot more work than the words in the first sentence which mostly reduplicate the meaning already contained in their neighbors. 

And this last sentence also illustrates an important final point to make about your journey into the world of poetry—you’ll always be making choices, and the priorities and principles of writing good poems are always in tension with each other. Put all your effort in novelty, and you’ll have to neglect clarity of emotion and legibility of language. Move toward one priority, and you’ll be moving away from another. 

Different poets find balance in different places—but, for the most part, you’ll find poets endorsing these key principles—novelty, imagery, stance, and compression. As much as you can have lyrical poems without rhyming or daffodils or old-fashioned words, take any of these four pieces out of your poem, and it just won’t work the way readers expect poetry to work. 

And it could go without saying that there’s a lot more to poetry, too—again, you can’t have an art form practiced around the world for thousands of years and also say everything there is to say about it in a short video. But these four principles are among the most foundational and essential to the identity of modern lyrical poetry. Put your focus on them as you practice your craft, and you’ll see you poetry improve in leaps and bounds. I know I’ve seen them make a big difference in my writing and in the work of countless beginning poets over the years. 

So, if you have to start somewhere, start here—you’ve got a whole lifetime of writing to fill in the rest. And, of course, this show is all about filling in the rest—so we hope to see you again next time for more writing fun. Until, have a great week—and go write some great poems!