So what makes a good poem? Great question! Here are some general tips:
- Don’t force rhyme! Rhyming dictionaries are often taken advantage of. Don’t rhyme just for the sake of rhyming. If you’re going to rhyme, make it sound natural and use words and word order that you would normally use.
- Don’t make it sound cheesy. That’s clear enough, yeah?
- Write normally. Don’t try to make it sound old. The old Victorian poems are great and the language they’re written in is beautiful, but that’s how they talked then! There’s no reason for a poem written today
- Write about what you know about. When you write from your own personal experiences, your poems will sound more genuine and real.
- Don’t be literal. The beauty of poetry is being able to compare something with something else. For example, don’t just say “She cried,” but say something like “Her eyes were leaking.” Ok, so that is a pretty bad example, but you get the point.
- Write well. Use alliteration, simile, rhyme, hyperbole, color, meter,
- Avoid cliches. Don’t talk about stairways to heaven or flying high on wings. That’s been done about a billion times already.
- Deliver the punchline. Have the last line or two really wrap up the poem well. Do this my making the lines particularly profound, witty, or entertaining.
- Be clever!
