To accompany the other posts I’ve written about questions to ask before and after you’ve written a poem, I thought I’d write another one concerned with the questions we should be asking ourselves while we’re writing. It’s important that as you develop your writing practice that you develop your inner critic, which is a voice which asks you questions as you write, such as the following:

Do I need this word?

At every point of your writing, you should be thinking about the purpose of every single word. There should be no extraneous word in your poem. It’s all about the economy of the line, with every constituent part earning its keep. Take a scalpel to every word in every line and ask yourself, ‘do I need this word?’ Would the poem survive without? You’ll be surprised how often the answer to this question is yes. And in order to mitigate the grief of losing one of your favourite words or lines, simply take a new page under the one you’re working on and copy a new edited version to that. This way you can compare old with new and see what works best for you. 

Where should I end this line?

One of the most puzzling problems I have with a lot of contemporary poetry is where poets end their lines. So often there seems to be a very haphazard approach to this with some revelling in weird line breaks. If you are intent on having a link break which disrupts the rhythm of your line and sentence then make sure there is a very good reason for it, as the reader will start to lose patience with stuttering lines which seem to stall into each other or finish before they’ve even started. 

Will the reader understand this?

We could argue, couldn’t we, about the importance of the reader doing some work and researching parts of a poem and how we don’t want to dumb down poetry. And indeed, you will have to work out for yourself where you want to stand on this, but we should never mistake simple, plain peaking as lacking complexity, just as we shouldn’t mistake being complex with being impossible to understand. Some of the finest, most resonant, most complex poems in the English language have been those written in the most lucid, plainest language possible. For me, writing poems is about the complexity derived from distilling words down into the plainest possible speech. So, will the reader understand this? Is a crucial question I ask myself when I write my poems. For you, this question might not matter, but at least in asking it of yourself you are defining your philosophy as a writer. 

Am I spending too long on this line?

We’ve all been there… you find yourself noting the hands of the clock moving round and round and still you’re on the same sentence, or line or word, wondering if this is the problem that’s holding the poem back. And one of the great difficulties in writing a poem can be unearthing the problem that’s holding the poem back. In modern parlance, we could call this ‘troubleshooting’. An awful word that we have to accept is part of writing a poem - finding the trouble in the poem, ironing out the kinks or taking down the roadblocks. These roadblocks could be anything from the fundamental idea of your poem just not working, to an image, or a verb choice, or a faulty/unnecessary first line. So, I’d suggest this: if you find yourself spending too long on a word or a line, the chances are you need to look deeper at what you’re really trying to say in the poem itself and maybe even accepting that it might be time to go back to the drawing board. 

Why have I ended the poem here?

Have you actually finished writing the poem or are you just clocking off early? Is the last word really the last word? Or are you just getting started? Knowing when to end your poem is difficult and so many wonderful poems just peter out, so don’t let yours be a casualty of this. On the other hand, some poems only really seem to get started at the end, so don’t expect the reader to have to plough through some mediocre lines to get to your amazing ending - the whole poem should hold their attention in the same way that the last line does. During the first draft, it may well be that you happen to write the ending to your poem which will remain the ending to your poem, but don’t be surprised if, after a while of editing, you find yourself using another line from the poem as the ending, or coming up with something else entirely. That’s poetry for you - it’s a long process, but worth it. 

Bonus 6th Question:

The sixth, bonus question, to ask yourself, though (and maybe even the most important) is: who will I ask for feedback on this poem?

Andrew is available for 1-2-1 mentoring and manuscript assessment - get in touch with him via email at info@andrewjamison.co.uk for more information and to discuss how to get started.