Turn Your Bad Poetry Into Gold

Or, at least into something a bit better

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Poetry is hard. One can easily spend a half hour on a couplet only to delete it in disgust later. Even after hours of painstaking labor, literary efforts can look absolutely appalling through the lens of time.

Now we all know alchemy doesn’t really work; we’re not likely to get pure gold out of our old poetry. But it is possible to polish it up a bit and make it shine at the right angle.

The things I’ve written five, ten, fifteen years ago make me want to crawl into a hole and die, but sometimes it’s better to face one’s mistakes head-on and do a little corrective work instead. That’s why I’ve taken a look at a couple of literary atrocities committed in my teens and attempted to remedy them.

Exhibit A:

Here is a poem I wrote for a creative writing class in college. Around this time I was always on the road, partying with friends who attended other schools, which may explain the theme I was attempting: some parallel between the “road of life” and burning hunger for companionship we (or, I believe, most of us) crave in this life.

It’s super-cringe, but bear with it to see how I attempt to clean it up later.

Original Draft:

Paper and Asphalt

The unseen heart
pumps and thumps its denizens
into motion without action

There’s still some life in its veins, I think

An asphalt web
skitters and litters
the world we know

We grip the asphalt, the concrete
with cheap rubber, rusty brakes, and corroding axels
and we burn, burn, burn,
Without fuel
Without fire

I doubt I’m the loneliest traveler out here
Though I know we all travel alone

But when all my wheels are touching is empty air
I pray I plunge beneath cool tides,
into an oasis of good memories

For the day our roads fork
and the asphalt we knew becomes dust and gravel…

What’s left of life will be scratched on old parchment for the ghosts to read,
the only veins will be traced in sand–dried and unflowing

And the unseen heart that pumped and thumped will remain undiscovered

If you’re still reading this article: congratulations, you passed the cringe test. Now here are the measures I took to transform this drivel into something more suitable for literary consumption:

New Title

I shortened the title down to just “asphalt” and lowercased it as well. The “Paper” in the original title comes into play at the end of both versions, but I didn’t feel the image was enhanced by including it the title; I felt it worked better as a surprise metaphor at the end.

Trimming Down the Fat

The first draft is simply too long and the metaphor of Earth as an asphalt-riddled cityscape traversed by lonesome souls gets beaten to death. I decided to keep the theme but immediately scrapped five out of nine stanzas, starting the revised version of the poem with an edited version of stanza #3.

I then took the penultimate stanza and changed the wording around, while retaining the theme: that of the earth as a kind of parchment being scrawled on by all the lives that tread on it’s surface.

New Look

I decide to remove all the capital letters from the original. This is just a matter of taste to me, but I prefer to forgo capital letters at the start of stanzas as well as periods at the end, although, as you can see in the poem, I’m still partial to colons.

Let me know what you think about the new revised draft:

Revised draft:

asphalt

look:
an asphalt web
like trellis creepers
climbing the earth

crisscrossed and
peppered with people
thumping senselessly
in time to some
nameless machination

and this:
wheels lacquered and black
burned treadless against
the asphalt

like a parchment
ink-scratched and leathery
and authored by legions

Exhibit B:

I wrote another bad poem as a teen, called “The Fish Bowl”, which you can watch me edit in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBLPDhsqmc

Final Thoughts:

Less Is More

When you take a look at your own work, you might not have such straightforward editing decisions to make, because you may have a more complex poem with complicated rhyme schemes that aren’t as easy to remedy, for example. However, generally speaking (and this is especially true of poetry although it applies to prose as well): less is more. The magic of poetry lies in its power to deliver a mind-bending punch using a mere page or two, sometimes even a few lines. This is why a simple haiku can be as indelible and profound as an 800 page novel.

Avoid Clichés

Clichés are anathema to good writing in general, and to poetry in particular. In fact, the beauty behind poetry is often defined by the avoidance of overused phrases. Describing a complex emotion or revelatory state of mind in language that not only raises the readers’ eyebrows by touching on something they’ve never been able to put into words is often the exact reason why poetry lovers open a book in the first place.

Be Original

It’s not just words and phrases that get overused. The same overarching themes and concepts and metaphors have been rehashed ad nauseum in, I suspect, just about every language. There’s nothing wrong about writing sad poetry about love and death and any of the major themes in life; but if you’re gonna write a weepy creepy heartbreaker of a poem, it’s got to be something special, otherwise your readers will yawn: they’ve read this stuff before, they’ve felt heartbreak before, and they’re probably not in the mood to distract themselves from whatever else they’re doing with a poem clearly penned by a moody adolescent in the throes of rejection.

In short: be original. Don’t write a disaster piece like the ones I’ve just shared. It’s okay to be funny or weird or entertaining in a way that subverts your readers’ expectations. Poems can have characters in it, needn’t rhyme, and can be composed of multiple languages in a format no one’s ever seen before. Why the hell not? Poetry is art with words and that’s all you need to know to pen your own piece. Go for it.

You can check out some of my poetry here: https://www.instagram.com/cameronbradley.writes/

And watch videos about literature and the writing process here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrEc0mxfvUSAH3ihDkr-XzQ