What Makes A Good Poem?

0So what DOES make a good poem? This is the big question that I am trying to answer with this project. Naturally, no matter who you ask, the answer will be different. So in actuality, there is only one way to find out what makes a good poem, and that is to ask yourself. In the meantime, however, I have here some answers given by others. Perhaps they will change your outlook on good poetry.

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What is a good poem?
A good poem is a slip-of-a-thing
that celebrates language, that takes
you on a short journey and touches your heart,
turns on your imagination, or tickles your funny-
bone somewhere along the way.

~ Nikki Grimes

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A good poem suprises your senses, shakes you awake, stirs your emotions, and startles your imagination. Each poem is an action of discovery. Poetry helps us widen our vision and our hearts.

~ Joan Bransfield Graham

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A good poem stays with me. I like the way it hangs out somewhere in the back of my mind coming to the front on occasion to remind me it's there.

~ Valerie Lewis

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What makes a good poem? A good poet.

~ X. J. Kennedy

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What is a poem?

Hard work.
Emotion surprised.
Throwing a colored shadow.
A word that doubles back on itself, not once but twice.
The exact crunch of carrots.
Precise joys.
A prayer that sounds like a curse until it is said again.
Crows punctuating a field of snow.
Hard work.

~ Jane Yolen

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A poem is a picture made of words.

Good poems can tell us what we already know in our bones but had never seen or heard or even put into words before. For a poem to be good it needs the element of surprise. That comes to the reader both in content, line break, sound, and voice. You read the opening line, are carried (or jolted) to the last line, and then wonder, how did I get here? There you are standing in this new place but feeling that, yes, you too, belong here.

A good poem is like a simply wrapped package that appears unremarkable at first glance. Until you read it. Then stars glow where there was never light before. Something sparkles. It might be you. It might be the dark. It might be the woman two rows ahead of you on the bus.

Good poetry gives us ourselves as if we've never had who we were before. It also gives us each other, shortens the gap between one and another. And good poems give us the world as if for the first time.

A fine poem needs mystery too; it doesn't say everything. If you were to compare a poem to a simple math equation, say 1 + 1 = 2, then a poem is butterfly + jagged scar = his warm breath on your neck. It's another way of knowing that makes perfect sense, but not logical, linear, rational sense. It's the way the heart knows, and the soul, the logic of dreams. It's how we know when we love or when we are afraid.

Poetry works on us not only through content but through sound. And for a poem to be well written it must remember that element as well. It needs to sound right. There's not just one right sound, but many, and each poem has its own that needs to be incorporated in order to be a thing of strength and beauty.

~ Patrice Vecchione

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~ Adam B.