Beating Intermediate Poet’s Block: Toss Out the “Perfect”
This article is for: Intermediate and Experienced Poets
Not so long ago, I emailed with a poet who was experiencing a problem.
She had been writing for just a few years, and though she started out making poems with joy and excitement, she was now struggling. The poems would not come for her, and when she did complete one, she tended to judge it severely.
So she was asking herself, “What happened? Where did that early delight go—and how can I get it back?”
I can absolutely sympathize with this: I’ve been there myself, and I’ve seen lots of students experience it too. I know it’s a painful place, and yet I also think in a strange way it has a positive side—though that does not mean you should stay in it!
So in this article, I’m going to talk about:
How perfectionism can mean progress—but you still need to let it go.
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How “You can’t get this wrong” turns into “I can’t get anything right”
When I’m teaching in schools, I make a point of telling the young writers that “In poetry, there aren’t any right answers—you can’t get this wrong.”
Most of the time, they believe me! And that gives them permission to write their poems freely. They enjoy getting down what they want to say, and they don’t worry about whether it’s “right.”
However, I can always tell which students don’t believe me.
They are the ones whose faces twist up with doubt, who fret over each line or word, and who often don’t want to share what they’ve written.
And nearly all the time, these students are the more experienced writers and readers of poetry in the group. Far from being nervous beginners, their writing is usually better than the work of their peers!
So what is going on here?
Why are these students torturing themselves? And why is the poet I emailed with having the same problem?
Intermediate poets have discovered how much they don’t know
The cause of all these poets’ anguish is relatively simple: they’re just not beginners anymore.
For just about everyone, starting poetry is a special time.
Something leads you to discover how easy and fulfilling it is to lay out words on a page, and suddenly you are intoxicated by the range of possibilities. You can use any words you want! In any order! Anywhere on the page that you like! And you can make them sound cool too! Who wouldn’t be entranced?
At this stage, you don’t know what you don’t know.
You don’t know much about the techniques or forms, or about things like “Showing, not telling” or “Making the form match the meaning.” You just write, and play, and have fun, and quite possibly think that you’re making some of the greatest poetry since Shakespeare, or indeed ever....
Then something wakes you up.
Maybe you start to read more poetry, and you see how other poets are doing things you can’t (yet). Or you take your poems to a feedback group or a teacher, and they let you know that there are flaws you need to work on, or technical things they suggest you learn, like meter.
Whatever leads you to this step, the result is:
You become aware of all that you didn’t care about before—and that means, a whole ton of things you’re missing or getting “wrong.”
Suddenly, your poetry-writing world has changed. It’s no longer enough to slap words on the page and rejoice. Instead you end up asking yourself questions like:
Are my line lengths all right in this poem? Should they be shorter, or longer? And are my line breaks in the best places?
Are my metaphors original enough? Am I using too many of them? Or too few?
Is there enough detail in my poems to “show” what I want? Or maybe there’s too much?
Am I using enough sound in my poems? Should I use more rhyme? Less rhyme? What is assonance and how can I make it?
Doubts like these can quickly multiply and take over, until all the joy of creation has been swamped.
And it’s made even worse by being unable to give reassuring answers to your questions, or fix the problems. More experienced poets ask themselves similar things, but they can give themselves positive answers. They know when they have done something well! And when they see a problem, they also have more tools for solving it. For poets who are still close to beginners, this is much harder.
Toss Out the Perfect
The end result of all this is, I think, a perception that the goal of writing poetry is to make something flawless.
This is entirely understandable—a natural consequence of feeling that there’s an impossible amount to learn about poetry, and that it is vital to get all of these things “right” all the time.
And reading published poems can reinforce this idea.
After all, we generally start writing poetry because we’ve discovered poems that astound us. The skill with which the poet has woven together all the elements of poetry—voice, imagery, rhythm, form, sound, and more—creates such an intense experience that we feel it really has reached a kind of perfection.
If you’re thinking this way, you can easily reach a point of despair. If the point of poetry is to be perfect, how can you ever hope to do that?
So you don’t write at all. Or if you do, you write slowly and painfully, prodding every word to see if it’s “good enough.”
And if you ever do complete a draft, you compare it with the work of great poets, and find it wanting.
This is not a happy place! So clearly, something needs to change.
Here’s how to do that.
See the problem as a blessing
First, I think it’s important to recognize that the situation itself is not the problem.
I don’t mean that suffering is good for you, or helps your art—that’s nonsense. We still want to make the painful stuff go away.
But if you’re in this position, it means that you have recognized that you have a lot to learn about poetry, and that it would be a good idea to learn it.
Therefore, you are on the path to becoming a better poet—even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.
(And to prove my point, remember that there are plenty of writers who never get there! They carry on thinking that they know everything and are writing works of genius, when they absolutely are not. While they stay like that, these writers have no chance of changing or improving.)
So what you need to do to is not to bewail your situation and wish it had never happened, but to think about it differently.
In other words, change your frame of reference.
Remember: We all get it wrong
Most importantly, let’s kill off the idea that a poem can be perfect. It can’t.
Yes, some poems are fantastically crafted, profoundly meaningful, intensely emotional, etc. etc. But they’re not perfect.
I guarantee you I can take your favorite poem, the one that means more to you than life itself, and find some flaw or problem in it.
I can also guarantee you that this is not going to change your appreciation of the poem one tiny bit.
For example, I’ll take “High Windows” by Philip Larkin, for decades now one of my favorite poems. I think the multi-generational perspective it opens up is breathtaking, and I love the turn to the final, unexplained image of the air—but even so I can pick out some weaknesses:
Line 2’s “she’s” makes for a weak line ending, and looks like “bossy rhyme” to me—there to make the rhyme with “paradise.”
I have always thought that the “combine harvester” image is a bit forced.
So, not perfect—and I don’t care. If anything, its being a flawed artifact makes me love it more.
As Molly Peacock once said, a poem is a hand-made object, and like all such things, it has small blemishes. But it was crafted with love and skill, and that’s what we respond to.
If you’re not convinced, I’ll do it again.
As you’ll know if you.ve read my post on Villanelles, I admire Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”. But I can still find limitations to it!
The line break after “intent” in line 2 makes for an awkward stutter in the middle of the phrase “the intent to be lost,” which ought to flow without interruption.
I have always found “places, and names, and where it was you meant / to travel” to be a bit vague. I’d prefer more detail, like “my mother’s watch” or the “lost door keys.”
In “a gesture / I love,” couldn’t we have had some indication of what gesture exactly?
There—it was easy to prove this one’s not perfect! And again, does it alter my admiration for the poem? No!
So, just to make sure I’ve made my point, because it’s really vital:
Some poems may feel perfect to us, but no poem really is.
And no poet is perfect either. For all the wonderful poems Larkin and Bishop created, they also wrote some stinkers. Even Shakespeare did that!
Not perfection, but compassion
So, you do not have to create perfection in your poems, or even aim for it.
It’s true that there are about 1,000 things you might do to a first draft of a poem to make it stronger, but that’s not about making it flawless.
And in fact, aiming for “perfect” often takes all the vibrancy and uniqueness out of a draft—as I have done many times myself!
So instead, aim just to write something.
As a business owner I know of likes to say, “Perfect is the enemy of done.”
If you’re more compassionate towards yourself about what you expect from your writing, you’ll create more of it—which, as I have written about before, will mean you actually end up making better work! (But, still not perfect.)
Be compassionate to us, too
And finally, you can take that idea of compassion a little further, and think about the good you can bring to the rest of us if you let yourself be OK with writing a flawed poem.
A flawed poem is better than no poem, because we want to hear what you’ve got to say—and if you agonize so much over your tools and techniques that you don’t write any poems, we never will!
So be easy on us, as well as on yourself, and draft the poem—knowing full well that, like all the poems in the world, it will be less than perfect.
But most of all, remember that if you feel this way, you’re actually doing well—and keep going!
Next Steps
Next time you feel crippled by doubt about your poems, here’s a little exercise to help.
Write a list of all the negative things you’re telling yourself.
This isn’t just self-flagellation: writing down the thoughts gives them a little less power, because they’re smaller now—just words on a page. And you can work with words—you are a poet, after all!Most likely, these negative thoughts are rather general, like “I can’t write.”
So try to turn each item in this negative list into a specific problem.
For example, “I can’t write:” might turn into “I don’t know much about poetic form,” or “The voice of my poems always sounds fake.”Create another list, of all the things you have learned about poetry so far.
Yes, all of them. No matter how small!
Use this second list to tell yourself that you can learn, do learn and will learn.
This should repair your confidence that your case is not hopeless! Far from it in fact.Using this newfound confidence, look back at your list of “problems.”
Now that you believe you can learn, what could you do to address each of the items on the first list?
Try to see each of these specific problems as a positive signal of things that it will help you to learn.
For example, if you don’t know much about poetic form, how could you learn more? You could:
—Read books or articles on form
—Read poets who use form
—Attend workshops on form.Make a plan. How can you put these new ideas into action?
You only need to plan out the first couple of steps.
Then, if at all possible put the first step into action, right away!
