What Makes a Poem Good?

in 1919 William Carlos Williams wrote the poem Epitaph it reads Epitaph an Old Willow with Hollow branches slowly swayed his few High bright tendrils and sang Love is a young green Willow shimmering at the bare Woods Edge in 2024 attakus poetry on Instagram wrote I love you more than chocolate heart I love you more than chocolate she said and I just was n ready for that sort of pressure today I want to compare some more recent poems I've come across with poems that I actually think are good but what I just did was a little

unfair I love you more than chocolate Heart by adus poetry was obviously meant to be a little more fous in tone and delivery than a very weighty poem like Epitaph I want the comparisons I make in this video to be as fair and in as good a faith as I can muster so let's take a look at attakus poetry's more serious Works she wasn't waiting for night she was waiting for a sword adus put your head up he said for you are a lion don't forget that and neither will the Sheep Baby I Love Your

Jazz that's a so here we can see what I would call a lack of depth in the insta poet's Cannon here I want to return to Epitaph for a moment it's a very touching poem there is a palpable sadness to it heightened by a grim for boing in its TI Idol but there is also such loveliness in the spry old Willow's song and there's so much to be interpreted from it is the willow lamenting his youth or imagining himself to still be young through the song is the young Willow in this song this symbol of

love one last Bastion of life in the otherwise desolate Woods surrounding it or is that Willow the point at which growth Begins revitalizing the bare wood it sits before William Carlos Williams was a master of sharp cutting imagery packed into very few words Atticus poetry is a master of recycling cliches and creating the poetic equivalent of Pop Rocks she sat in her perfect house with her perfect husband wishing that her perfect life would end then they keep scrolling what does that actually leave the reader with this lady is going to stab someone you're a predator

2016 B movie meme core now part of why I find these poems especially bad is because they are especially commercial they're clearly designed just to be posted online and you could at least partially blame poetry Queen rupy core for this she certainly went a long way in popularizing poems that read like py Star readings don't mistake salt for sugar if he wants to be with you he will it's that simple I do not need the kind of love that is draining I want someone who energizes me and here you are living despite it all yeah

man here I am but a lot of people have already driven in that hate wagon and I don't want to linger on her work for too long because frankly I don't think there's much to talk about the work isn't substantive enough to criticize Beyond a lack of substance it's designed to explain itself it has pictures if you get confused and let me assure you it's not the length of these poems that prevent them from having depth look at this absolutely crushing poem by Langston Hughes lamenting the loss of his friend how about this Bleak Bleak

work by kidge on the Advent of winter our second treebase today if you're counting look at Maya Angelo paint this captivating picture of insomnia as if it were the result of failing to woo sleep to her these certainly aren't the poet's deepest work but look how much they can pack into these little fragments and they do it with a masterful understanding of poetic devices at their disposal and I'm talking even the basics man like simile metaphor personification the stuff you learned in Middle School let's go back to rupie core for just a second longer because

her work shows it so blatantly with a lot of contemporary poetry I've seen especially these insta poems poetic devices are by and large just thrown out the window but her poems are exceptional here in that she nearly foros them entirely even attacus poetry once stumbled into using a metaphor and I'm not saying you always have to use a certain amount of this you're not required to make every cloud cry and flower dance but you have to do something Beyond just writing a basic aphorism and splitting it into a few lines without the these poetic tools

without substance without a willingness to take creative risks you're not left with much of a voice here I mean a lot of this stuff feels to me indistinguishable from any motivational stock image you can find on Google but that's not always the case and that's why I'm finally moving on from this horrible Meer into another horrible Meer this next poet I want to discuss for comparison is at least attempting to create a voice for himself but as I think you'll see his work is PL by similar troubles so here's the immortal work of Sam pink

when I see a frog and it takes a hop away from me it's like what the man the woodchuck in my backyard doesn't trust me and he's right because the first chance I get I'm going to put this tiny witch hat on him stupid piece of you can see he's using vulgarity to convey heightened emotions and display a more colloquial manner of writing or maybe he's just being lazy I said maybe I don't know now this is a very Bukowski in style of writing and anyone who knows me knows I'm a big Bukowski boy Bukowski's

poetry is also generally short prosaic and uses a lot of vulgarity but it also has substance and I think Bowski is more sincere in his tone whereas these feel very performatively aloof in a way that's kind of like really annoying but Kowski is also interested in not only taking creative and stylistic risks but also covering more difficult and hard-hitting topics which I certainly have not read all of Mr Pink's Cannon but I did genuinely try and search for more emotionally compelling ones and I did find a poem of his and a poem of Bukowski's that

I felt had a similar message so I'll be comparing these two next this is yesterday's bull dies today by Sam pink also I'm sorry I'm censoring all these which you know one could argue was a little unfair but I'm just trying not to get Shadow banned watching a breeze move through some grass I imagined it was just the grass shaking off yesterday's bull to prepare for today to prepare for more bull okay go ahead and take a second to soak that in okay and here's cut while shaving from Bukowski it's never quite right he said

the way people look the way the music sounds the way the words are written it's never quite right he said all the things we are taught all the loves we Chase all the deaths we die all the lives we live they are never quite right they are hardly close to right these lives we live one after the other piled there as history the waste of the species the crushing of the light in the way it's not quite right it's hardly right at all he said don't I know it I answered I walked away from the

mirror it was morning it was afternoon it was night nothing changed it was locked in place something flashed something broke something remained I walked down the stairway and into it okay a moment to process so I don't really think this is a question here both poems in my mind are tackling the monotony of life but but Bowski is the much better read in this poem The Man Bukowski is speaking to Likens the monotony of human history to a feeling of alien discomfort nothing ever feels right because there's nothing behind it and it feels like there

should be that is a really interesting way to frame an existential crisis and it is very evocative of that dissociative dread you can get into when you like stare at something too long or repeat your name too many times and see the way he uses line breaks to emphasize certain things or to simulate a quickening of pace and then a full break to stop and give himself a dramatic pause before Bowski gives his reply and then another pause before the reveal that this man he was speaking to was his reflection see him breaking out of

that Fugue here he feels at the same time some Revelation that illuminates something within him destroys something within him but ultimately leaves him where he started and it's up to him to make his way down the stairs and continue on this doomed path then then we got this other one I see a blandness in approach no pacing and a personification of grass so weak that not even the author can commit to it I don't want to sound pedantic here but you know you can be inventive in your poetry right you don't have to imagine the

grass doing anything you can make it come to life like the tree from earlier and where's the Rhythm or Pace it's just rows of similarly sized lines over and over and over perhaps the intent was to be boring so as to embody the message of the poem in which case I don't feel it was worth it and that by the way is a huge problem in all the poems I've been criticizing so far where is the Rhythm here's another pink poem I see an old man on a motorized cart steering with one hand holding a

leaf blower with the other he was blowing leaves around Mony Direction literal monotony it's monotone poems don't have to be like this even the short ones but especially not the not short ones the the long ones poetry is the art of the written word it's not just Pros with the sentences chopped up you need an eye for meter and prity to make a compelling poem you need to know when to throw in an enjam men or punctuate the line or do away with punctuation entirely you as the poet can set the pace for the reader

and if you so choose vary that pace to make it more interesting and no I'm not saying all poems have to be an i Amic pentameter or or Rhyme or even be conventionally done look at this stroke of Genius and possibly actual stroke from EE Cummings and you know what I'm being serious here you either get that or you don't go back to insta poetry if you don't rock with my boy double e I'll say this here's one pink poem that I found promising our third and final tree based poem of the day Masters I

respect trees for picking a place to live and doing as much as they can there and dying there and never really making mistakes I mean look it's also just a thought partitioned out into a few lines but it does feel genuine to me it lacks that forced like ID GF attitude that the others have I think there's something poignant here and I wanted to include it to note that I don't think we've run out of things to say I just think we've largely abandoned the techniques to say them well anyway if we were to do

a recap I think that we've collected three symptoms of the bad cont temporary poem epidemic the poems lack substance they're not concerned with using interesting poetic devices and they ain't got rhythm this leads me to the final comparison I want to make in this video and as Fair as I tried to make it I think the difference is very Stark and worth seeing this is comparing a beloved classic to a poem I saw that bothered me so much I decided to make this video but before I do this I want to be clear that I

am not trying to compartmentalize all modern or contemporary poems into this box and say they're all like this or they're all bad I've gathered here what I would say has floated to the top of the trash Heap in the modern day and age I thought it would be interesting to discuss as I think it does show a decline in Artistry among writers brought on by an era that favors nearly any other medium over the written word but if you like any of the poems that I've been criticizing okay I'm going to read both these poems

as they are written as best I can and afterwards I will share which one I think is the good one and which one I think sucks and why but I am trying to give you my single viewer a chance to experience these poems fairly and form your own opinion before I shove mine into your eyes and ears if I had three lives after Melbourne by the whitlams if I had three lives I'd marry you in two the other perhaps that life over there at Starbucks sitting alone riding a memoir maybe a novel or this poem

no kids probably a small apartment with a view of the river and books lots of books and time to read friends to laugh with and a man sometimes for a weekend to remember what skin feels like when it's alive I'd be thinner in that life vegan practice yoga I'd go to Art films farmers markets drink martinis and swingy skirts and big jewelry I'd vacation on the main coast and wear a flannel shirt weekend guy I left behind loving the smell of sweat and aftershave more than I did him I'd walk the beach at Sunrise find

perfect shell Spirals and study pock marks water makes in sand and I'd wonder sometimes if I'd ever find you when you are old when you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their Shadows deep how many loved your moments of glad Grace and loved your beauty with love false or true but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the Sorrows of your changing face and bending down beside the

glowing bars murmur a little sadly how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars so when you are old by Will Willam Butler Yates is a favorite of many and I'm no exception Yates as a poet demonstrates such a Mastery over dition and prity that the poems feel like they read themselves you feel like you're being carried through the stanzas and in the case of this poem softly gently dropped into a pit of despair this ending scene of capital L love fleeing into the mountains and its

countenance becoming lost in the night sky is such a crushing and Powerful closer and leaving you there at the end having this final image in your mind looking wistfully out at the stars above the mountains hoping to catch a glimpse of what was lost up there I mean that's what it's all about man this other one by Sarah Russell I yeah yeah I really don't like it I chose these poems together because I feel that they are about similar topics which I would broadly describe as love lost and a bit more specifically a very intimate

connection that leaves an emptiness in its wake now as for the surface level issues I've been harping on through this entire video they're all here and I actually found a reddit.com comment in researching this that I think summarizes it pretty well and unsurprisingly actually touches on some of the points I've mentioned throughout the video in terms of the poem's poor construction look firstly I go on Reddit all the time and lie about my identity on Burner accounts so I can't confirm whether or not this person is actually a poetry teacher but if that is the

case please forgive my indiscretion when I say I feel that this comment seriously misses the biggest flaw in this poem which is that it doesn't prove its thesis at all I did listen to the song that inspired this poem containing the titular phrase and it was a non seiter line in the scheme of things so the poet was working with the generally blank canvas and she makes it clear what the poem was about by the end that in this third life the one the narrator lives for in their own self they still feel that something

is missing and that person is their spouse in the other two lives and you know at least this poem has some tempted substance behind it which I think is like the lowest possible Bar for a piece of writing but I felt the need to point it out after what we've gone through I just don't think the poem does a very good job in executing this idea the bulk of the text is just a collection of pleasant banalities that lead nowhere and then the poem just kind of slaps you in the face with its meaning at

the end in when you are old yeets goes out of his way to note the merits of this lost love that while other suitors may have loved this person's superficial quality ities of grace and beauty only this particular person connected with them on a spiritual level the soul and he proved that by continuing to love this person as they age in three lives there is no time devoted to what makes this love so desirable why there is such an absence felt in a life bereft of it in fact upon closer inspection these little vignettes into

the third life raise some alarming points I can understand things like having more time to read without a partner or kids or more freedom to travel but also the narrator says that in this third life they have friends to laugh with as if to imply in the other two lives they don't they would also be thinner and vegan as if this twice married spouse is forcing them to bulk up on Stakes or in this closer which I do find cliche they go to the beach which you can take your family to the beach the repeated

mention of non-serious hookups I also find exceptionally strange in its wording to remember what skin feels like when it's alive are you feeling dead skin more frequently than alive skin what about your skin are you a zombie in this third life is your skin like shriveled and flaking off onto your swingy dress and big jewelry now obviously that's not the poet's intent from my understanding the idea I interpret as trying to be conveyed here is that this third life is more self-centered and independent but the narrator still feels the absence of their spouse and no

art film fling or Farmers Market can fill that void hey by the way you can buy meat at the farmers market maybe your spouse will let you go to the farmers market if you tell them there's meat just go to the farmers market just just it's why can't you go I don't it I'm sorry I'm I'm being I'm okay now see now this is where this I'm starting to go off the rails anyway as I hope I demonstrated and in line with the comment from earlier everything mentioned about this third life seems not very thoughtfully

constructed and obviously neither are the other two lives that weren't mentioned at all which leaves the poem having not mentioned any merits to this life or the other life with the spouse aside from I guess a consistent access to live skin and those references to the Casual flings are the closest it gets to making some sort of contrast especially this ending which is as callous as it is sacaran where the narrator notes that they love the smell of weekend guy more than weekend guy himself in reference to how unfulfilling these brief flings are before standing

out on the the shore collecting sea shells longing wistfully for monogamy I think this poem could have done better to actually contrast the pros and cons of this life with the other two lives or mention anything about this person so great you'd marry them twice I mean if you mention this Grand love here and then mention it here and then don't mention anything about the love whatsoever here then how am I supposed to feel what am I buying into exactly it seems like this poem is more interested in having the reader do the heavy lifting

and imagine their own spouse who won't let them have friends or go outside which is a valid approach on one hand but as I've hoped to convey through these gests seems to actively work against the poem's intentions to return to when you are old one last time this poem is significantly shorter and I want to take a moment to appreciate how in its brevity it manages to convey the weight of a Love's irrevocable loss the poem is so tragic a brooding on the agony of bere that comes with age your looks and vivacity fade the

people you love die you grow tired and yet there is a Repose for old Willows with Hollow branches a comfort in that the passage of time has rendered this deep pain into only a murmur a little sad yes but that book that memory is itself an invaluable vestage of that love once felt a youthful love at the foot of the mountains a young green Willow Shimmer ing at the bare Woods Edge call it poet Tre and that's what it was all leading up to anyway send this video to arborists who love poems and as an

addendum I'll preempt this criticism well at Cole Rudy I don't see you sharing your poetry yeah you're welcome anyway I'm signing off