How to Write Better Poetry: The Most Common Advice I Give my Mentees

Writing tips from a professional poetry mentor

In my years as a mentor, there have been some pieces of advice that I find myself giving again and again. Usually I give this advice to new poets, because it relates to essential difficulties that hold them back from progressing. But it’s not always new poets, often this advice is relevant to more experienced poets too. No one is too far along to have a stumbling block, and blocks are tough to see with only one pair of eyes. Sometimes the difficulty can be surprising, and a fresh perspective can invigorate your practice. 

The list I’m about to give you isn’t the usual list you’ll see everywhere – read more than you write, carry a notebook with you at all times, edit, etc. – those things are well and good, but this is the kind of specific advice that a professional writer will tell you in a private tuition session; they’re things I say to mentees all the time. I explain each one below, but for the TLDR version, you can just glance over the bullet points.

So here it is, starting with the 3 pieces of advice I give the most:

1. Stop trying to sound like a poet

This is what makes poems tawdry, affected, and unoriginal. It prevents the writer from using and recognising their actual voice. Trying to sound like a poet can come from unfamiliarity with the form, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important to read lots of poetry. When we don’t know what actual poems sound like, we default to what we think they should sound like, and the result is false and forced. Trying to sound like a poet can also be the result of anxiety: we want to be a poet, we want to sound like a poet, so we strive to do the poetry thing, whatever we think that is (and it’s different to different people). It’s an understandable impulse, and we probably don’t even realise we’re doing it, but it diverts us from real inspiration and prevents us from getting to know our actual voices. This is the hurdle that every new poet has to jump if they’re going to stick with writing poetry and get good. Every great poet started here, figuring out how to move on.

2. You’re neither telling nor showing, you’re explaining

Telling is great, showing is great. Tell versus Show is a false dichotomy. The thing you should avoid doing is explaining. So often, when a poem isn’t working and the poet just can’t seem to make it work, it’s because they’ve spent the poem explaining or summarising the significance of what they’re talking about, rather than laying it out and letting the significance speak for itself. The paraphrasable ‘message’ of a poem isn’t as important as you think it is, what really matters is the interplay of elements, of images, structure, sound etc. These create complex relationships and profound significance far beyond what the poem may be ostensibly about. Poems work on multiple levels that exceed their basic, primary meaning. Long story short, don’t explain, just do.

3. You’re hiding your meaning at the same time you’re trying to express it

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to assume that poetic = obscure. Occluding your actual meaning in a cloud of slant images, indirect statements, and confusing fragments doesn’t make a poem better, it makes it shallow and unintelligible. Say what you mean. The purpose of a poem is always to reveal, to illuminate, never to hide or obscure. You certainly can’t reveal and obscure at the same time, that’s working against yourself, and doomed to failure.

A poet once told me a phrase from quantum mechanics that applies equally well to poetry: ‘there’s a difference between an out of focus photograph and a picture of a fog bank’. Sometime we use a blurry technique because what we want to describe is by nature blurry, and we fit the technique to the subject matter. The difference between that and hiding-while-expressing is that the aim is to depict and reveal the subject clearly, as it is in all its blurry reality.

Sometimes the impulse to obscure doesn’t come from a misguided attempt at poetic-ness, often it happens because the poet simply feels shy and vulnerable about expressing themselves and describing their experience. So, they try to hide even as they attempt to reveal. This is a tough leap to make, especially if it’s important to you to express something difficult. But, if you’re to express yourself genuinely, it’s a leap you need to make. Remember though, poems don’t have to be about difficult personal subjects.

4. Don’t finish your poem with a summary of what the poem means

This is why some writers advise cutting the last couple of lines from your first draft. I’ve read many, many poems that ended perfectly enough, and then the writer carried on for a few more lines just to make sure I got the message. You don’t need to do this, the reader is a smart cookie, 99% of the time they get it, so just let your finale hang. It will be better, I promise.

5. This poem should have finished [x] lines ago

Similarly, some poems just go on and on and on. They pass the end and just keep on trucking. If you find yourself with a very long poem, ask yourself: does it really need to be that long? Sometimes the answer is yes, the poem is exactly as long as it needs to be, it’s just a long poem. Long is totally fine; you only have a problem when a poem feels long, which often has nothing to do with its actual length. A poem is too long when the mass impacts pace and impact. You might not need everything you put into the first draft, it may surprise you to learn just how much you can cut.

6. Poetry cannot abide redundancy

But how can you tell what needs to go? It might not be a matter of lines, it might be short phrases, images, or individual words. The only things that should be included in a poem are those things which are absolutely necessary for it to achieve its intended meaning and effect. Everything else is junk. If you’ve taken 50 words to say what you could have said better in 5, you need to cut. I’m being hard about it because a hard line makes it easier to judge what you may or may not need in your poem. You can certainly go about it more gently, but a policy of ‘strictly necessary’ might help you orientate yourself more effectively, more quickly. Some poets approach a poem minimalistically then expand out, others write copiously and voluminously and then edit down. Either way or something in between is totally fine, but the end result is the same – the perfect essentials. 

7. This image doesn’t make logical sense

This one tends to surprise people. Yes, poetic imagery is imaginative and intuitive and mysterious, but even so it’s not the case that anything goes. An image is a delicate machine; it needs to work smoothly on multiple levels for the mind to accept it as poetic truth so it can then achieve its full effect. That means it has to logically add up, on its own terms I would add, but it still needs to add up.

For example, if your heart is a lion and a lightning bolt and an autumn leaf all at the same time, in the same breath, that’s too many conflicting things all at once. The imagination can’t accept it as true. Things like position, perspective, process, passage of time, can also be relevant to a complex image.

Another common problem is that the two things being compared are two similar, there’s not enough distance between the two objects or concepts for the comparison to be meaningful. Whatever reasoning the image abides by, it has to remain consistent to be strong. Strong images take a lot of careful crafting, and what may have seemed to make sense to you initially may not hold poetic water on closer inspection, so be prepared to work on your images or to swap them out entirely if necessary.

8. This is too abstract, it needs more concrete imagery

What do I mean by that? Let’s start with the meaning of ‘abstract’. An abstract is something that exists as a concept or idea rather than as a physical, tangible object. Things like innocence, happiness, grief, love and freedom are all abstracts. A tangible or perceptible object in the world would be described as ‘concrete’.

We all want to say things about abstract ideas in poems – things about our love for our beloved, things about our ideas and values, things about the pain of our loss, and so on. The problem (counterintuitively) is that if you write the abstract words ‘freedom’, ‘love’, ‘pain’, or ‘happiness’ etc., they don’t actually make anyone feel or understand those things, they just indicate what they are. Poets will sometimes load their poems with abstracts upon abstracts, thinking that will make their poem deeper and more powerful, when in reality the poem means very little, and makes next to no connection with the reader.

You make people feel and understand abstract ideas when you use concrete images to anchor them in real experience and real meaning. You can convey abstract concepts very powerfully through concrete images alone, without ever having to mention them by name. It’s totally fine to use abstract words by the way, but know that they won’t get the job done alone. You need concrete images to ground and illustrate your ideas, that’s what makes them meaningful and real.

9. This is not grammatically correct

These are some of the main culprits: incomplete sentences, usually missing subjects or verbs, or sentences that just stop without finishing; commas, full stops, semicolons, dashes, all used incorrectly or missing; inconsistency of tense and/or perspective; long chains of clauses joined together by ‘as’ that go on and on and often end nowhere; unnecessary, affected inversions of word order; inappropriate or sub-optimal prepositions; capital letters where they shouldn’t be, or capital letters that should be there and aren’t.

We expect painters to know how to use their brushes and paints; we expect musicians to be able to play their instruments. A poet is expected to be proficient in the tools of their trade – words and grammar. Importantly, this is more than a matter of pedantry or propriety. If you master correct grammar then it can help you to communicate very complex ideas to your reader clearly, it can add further layers of meaning, it contributes to drama and suspense…everything that you want a good poem to do, grammar will help you to achieve it.

Yes, lots of poems don’t use standard grammar or punctuation, but you have to be really, really good at grammar to write poetry in non-standard syntax. Believe me. Likewise, you need to have mastered punctuation before you can write a poem without it. Be like Picasso, first master the basics.

(Note: I know this is easier said than done for some writers, and that this part of the writing can be a particular challenge for some. If that sounds like you, then that's ok, but you’ll need to try hard, get help, and find strategies to overcome the extra challenge. It will be worth it though.)

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This post is quite long enough already, so I’ll cut it there. I have a lot more tips to hand out though, so I'll be back with another post sometime soon. In the meantime, if you’ve any thoughts or questions about my tips, leave me a comment. I’m always open to chat.

Every poet starts somewhere, but no poet grows alone. If these tips resonated with you and you're ready to write with more confidence, I'd love to help. Take a look at my self-paced courses, professional critique, and tutorial services at The Poetry Master Class.

If you're interested to read some poems of my own, I now publish all of my new work for free on my Substack, Solarion.