Making our poems understandable

By Dennis Mellersh

In writing our poems, one of the key attributes we should focus on is making our poems easily understood by our potential readers.

The need to make our poems comprehensible as opposed to incomprehensible would seem to be self-evident.

But many aspiring poets, and I include myself, can fall into the trap of being so passionate concerning what we are writing about in the poem, that we can make fundamental mistakes in communicating our core poetic message effectively.

Here, briefly, are a few of the ways that we can ensure greater clarity in our poetry efforts (and this is largely my own personal view).

Imagery and references: The key goal here is to use imagery and reference language that the reader will understand. If we have taken a course in Greek and Roman mythology for example, and use those references in our poems, we are automatically excluding a large segment of potential readers who are not familiar with this mythology.

Similarly if we use a lot of jargon pertaining to any branch of knowledge we are well acquainted with, if the reader is not familiar with this jargon, our message will not communicate well.

Personal experience: Our poetry will be naturally based on our personal experience in life and our worldview, but unless we can express our experiences in a way that is universal, or common to everyone’s life experience (the human condition) the poem will not resonate.

Vocabulary: Much of the poetry many of us studied in school was from the ancients, the Middle Ages, and from the 1700s and 1800s, and the language in many of those poems was obviously not contemporary to the language used by readers today.

We may be tempted to make our poems sound like the “real poems” we studied in class, but using older poetic language makes our poems sound dated, overly “flowery”, and possibly boring, as it doesn’t sound “new.”

Using lots of “big” words when smaller, more familiar words would do better, takes away the “life” from our poems, and worse, can sound pretentious and make our poem read as if we are showing off our “learning.” This can result from overuse of a thesaurus, instead of using words immediately understood by the reader.

Not focussing on our core objective in our poem: Unless we are writing a substantial, long poem we should concentrate on one or two major intentions, such as creating a mood, creating an image, telling a story, exploring an idea.