The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets

Note: This article on the rules of poetry was adapted from a recent Writers.com newsletter for poets. Find our invitation to join in the article!

When I was first asked to write an article on the rules of poetry, I briefly short-circuited. There are no rules of poetry, I was about to say, that’s the whole point of writing it. 

Many of my fellow poets will tell you the same thing. It’s not that there aren’t principles of successful poetry, but to say there are rules implies a strict set of dos and don’ts—and any poem that doesn’t conform is, ultimately, not a poem.

I don’t believe that to be true, and I actually love poems that break the rules of poetry. Nonetheless, there are definitely worthwhile guidelines to know about, whether poets choose to follow them or break them intentionally.

Here, then, are the rules of poetry for contemporary poets, with examples of poems that follow the rules—and poems that break them. 

The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets

Here are some rules you may have heard with regard to writing successful contemporary poetry: 

Rules of Poetry: Show, Don’t Tell

Alternately, to quote William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Poems ought to convey tangible experience.

What this means is that poems ought to convey tangible experience; they should uphold the primacy of imagery over abstraction. Images alone should convey a poem’s ideas, feelings, and attitudes. If the poem, or the speaker of the poem, names abstractions or tells you how it feels, then the poem is doing the work of interpretation for the reader, or else reducing the poem’s capacity for complexity by limiting its imagination.

Here’s a vivid short poem that does a great job of showing instead of telling, retrieved here: 

“In the Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

Pound here combines a haiku-inspired approach to poetry with a sharp, surprising comparison. In two lines, the whole of Modernism feels present here: its cacophonies and discordances, and the melange of faces populating a subway station in the strange new urban world. 

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Break the Line on Verbs, Images, Breaths

Because line breaks differentiate poetry from prose, they are a primary tool for us to consider in our work. Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities. The line break makes the line its own unit which, in coordination with the poem’s clauses and sentences, results in a kind of forward-moving tension that strings the work along to its conclusion. This is true for both free verse and formal work.

Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities.

The conventional wisdom—one that was hammered into me in undergrad—was to end lines on important words, usually verbs or concrete images. This is an easy guide to follow, as it allows those important words to operate on two registers, both the line it sits in and the line that follows it. It also emphasizes those words to the reader. 

One professor once told me that you should be able to read the end words of a poem alone and grasp what the poem is getting at. (Of all the rules of poetry I’ve been taught, I might disagree with this one the most.)

An alternate way of approaching line breaks is to read the words out loud, and break the line wherever you take a natural breath—an idea present especially in the world of the Beats and of mindful poetry. This allows the poem to mimic human speech and thought, following your own intuition and relationship with language.

Here’s an example of a poem with concrete, intentional line breaks, retrieved here:

“Weather” by Linda Pastan

These line breaks are so good! I love the complicated syntax of a menace “opening” over the speaker’s childhood, that stanza break at “seems” (a subtle nod at the gulf of perception and reality), and that one-word line “dazzling”, which really, truly dazzles. 

Do Not Be Cloying, Mawkish, Maudlin, Schmaltzy; Avoid Sentimentality

Pardon the SAT words, but they all point towards the same idea: do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

Do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

It’s not that poetry doesn’t have capacity for intense emotion. But, when a poem magnifies emotions past a certain point, the work itself feels unserious or uninteresting. Big feelings aren’t quite so interesting as the contexts and conclusions that may come from them, but the poet, as an artist, knows how to select only the most relevant and interesting feelings so that they don’t engulf the point of the poem.

Here’s a poem that certainly has big feelings, but explores them in a way that feels genuine and real, retrieved here:

“We Have Not Long to Love” by Tennessee Williams

He’s more well known for his fiction and playwriting, but Williams here delivers an admirable poem, both for its lyricism and its soft yearning. He toes the line well: it would be far too schmaltzy to say “we’re all going to die and I’ll never love you the way I should”—but that’s not the sentiment here at all. What we get, really, is a brief and gorgeous rumination on the urgency of love, and how difficult it is to love despite its urgency. 

Avoid Redundancy and Redundant Amplification

This is pretty straightforward. Every word in a poem should be essential. If you can remove a word or a sentence, and the poem’s meaning and effect doesn’t change, remove it. Omit needless words.

Every word in a poem should be essential.

Repetition for the sake of amplification is sometimes useful, but if that repetition doesn’t contribute to the poem’s impact (or even distracts from it) then, again, remove it. Simplify the poem as much as possible—keeping in mind that to simplify is not, necessarily, to reduce complexity; we are simply searching for the simplest ways to express the most complex ideas.

Here’s a poem whose concision is felt deeply, yet whose repetition is essential, amplifying all the more its ideas, retrieved here:

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

This heartwrenching little poem doesn’t need many words to convey the depth and intensity of its feeling. Despite the fact that it largely dabbles in abstraction, it still has motion and movement to it: the friend goes away (dies), the poem returns to its starting point; the cycle of love and loss feels both brief and endless. 

Do Not Rhyme for the Sake of Rhyming

Contemporary poetry has a rather tortured relationship with rhyme and meter.

Now, it’s not as tortured as it used to be. The Beats, The New York School, and The Confessional Poets of mid-century steered English-language poetry further away from its highly architected past. Then, New Formalism came onto the American poetry scene and argued for a return to rhyming, metrical poems.

A period of the 1970s and 1980s are now called The Poetry Wars, in which New Formalists fought with everyone else to say that formal poetry deserves more space in the world of poetry and publishing. Those “wars” are too detailed to summarize, but the point I’m making is, it used to be even worse for formalist poets.

Nowadays, formal poetry is certainly more accepted in the poetry world. The canon has also expanded to include forms that don’t hail from the West, like the South Asian/Persian/Arabic Ghazal form or the Malaysian Pantoum. And I do see iambic pentameter in contemporary poetry journals from time to time, in poems that are really accomplished and exceptional.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming. Sometimes, a poem that rhymes ends up with tortured language, language whose purpose is simply to rhyme and make grammatical sense—but not to reveal, illuminate, expound, complicate, or expand the poem’s possibilities.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming.

In the formal poetry of yesteryear, every rhyming word accomplishes something essential and artistic; so, too, in the non-rhyming poetry of today. So when a poem rhymes just so that it can rhyme, the poem loses so many opportunities to push the boundaries of language, or to reveal something about the words that are rhymed. 

Of course, rhyme can also accentuate a poem’s movements, contribute to an interesting story, or even be dismantled for poetic effect. The point, again, is to rhyme with intention, whether it’s to highlight tensions and contrasts between ideas, to tell a great story in verse, or to reveal something through the poem’s own architecture.

Here’s an example of a New Formalist poem, so you can get a sense of contemporary rhythm and meter, retrieved here: 

“Sonnet On a Line From Vénus Khoury-Ghata” by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is a brilliant contemporary voice in formal poetry, able to write within virtually every type of form poem. What might differentiate this sonnet from classical variations of the form is its syntax: those hard stops and punctuations that occur mid-line feel distinctly modern, interrupting the flow of the language with intention. A successful poem will negotiate the tension between the sentence and the line to produce more complex meanings. And, of course, these 10- and 11-syllable lines scan beautifully, with end-rhymes that do not impede the flow of the work, but rather fit within the poem’s aesthetic whole (even when the rhymes themselves start to slant).

Learn more about forms of poetry here:

https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry 

Seek Aesthetic Unity

Lastly, and briefly, a successful poem in the contemporary sense will have some form of aesthetic unity. By this, I mean that all aspects of the poem correspond to something central. There’s a gestalt that forms only when every element is present and placed intentionally in the work. 

All aspects of the poem correspond to something central.

This might look like a poem relying on the same categories of image. Conversely, a poem whose subject matter is fragmented or disjointed might also include fragmentation in its word choice and line breaks.

However the poem strives for this unity, contemporary poetry often strives for it.

Here’s a poem that has this unity of effect in action, retrieved here:

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand

Is absence an aesthetic? Certainly it is in this poem, whose negotiations with self and place move swiftly through sharp, bright line breaks. The movement of the speaker reflects the movement of this poem, whose repetitions feel like ways of filling the empty space of the speaker’s own body, of the poem’s own brevity. 

Other Contemporary Rules of Poetry

The list of dos and don’ts can be rather tedious, perhaps even nonexhaustive. Nonetheless, here’s an unfinished assemblage of guidelines I’ve been given over the years.

• Avoid lofty, abstract words like “soul”. If everyone interprets the meaning of a word in dramatically different ways, it has no useful effect in the poem. 
• Words that ring of yesteryear are best avoided. These include, but are not limited to: Oer, eterne, alas, hark, heretofore, afar, ere, forswear, forsooth, prithee, anon, nought, perchance, and aye. 
• Poems should always be written left-flush, unless there is an artistic reason for using indentation or right-flush lines, but never write an entire poem in which the line is centered on the center of the page.
• Starting a poem or an aside with “once” to tell a story from the past is convenient, but rather overdone.
• Metaphors can lend themselves to effective poetry, but a metaphor is not inherently poetic, and poetry overloaded with metaphors and similes will likely falter under the weight of comparison. 
• “Untitled” is, in fact, a title, and not a very effective one. Unless  you have intention behind “Untitled,” give your poem a more intentional title. 
• Do not write in a poem what is best expressed in prose. 
• Do not preach, proselytize, or try to be didactic in poetry. 
• Although poetry requires skill and intellect, do not write poems with the intent of being praised for your genius, or with the intent of becoming famous online. 

Against the Rules of Poetry Craft

Despite the fact that I’m a workshop organizer and educator—or, perhaps, because I am those things—I have an ambivalent relationship to these rules of poetry in the 21st century.

This isn’t to say that the rules of poetry are wrong (though there are some that I dislike), or that contemporary poetry is worse than older poetic movements (though individual poems fail to live up to my standards). I just hate prescriptivism in general; I dislike formulaic art, and I think there is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

There is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

It’s not that these rules are wrong. It’s that they’re rules. And it’s not that rules are always bad; it’s that, especially in art, they should not be treated with such absolute power as they’re given.

My favorite poems—the ones that challenge me, delight me, and show me new possibilities in language—break rules. They are daring, stubborn, perhaps even iconoclastic. These poems know what the rules are and know when to follow their own internal logic instead.

I like it when a poem has ungainly line breaks, or lines that are way too long for the page. I like it when a poem is a bit over-indulgent, because, really, why should the poem moderate itself? And I like it when poems are highly conceptual, or when poems begin in iambic pentameter and end unmetered, and I LOVE when a poem cannot be easily categorized.

A Poem That Breaks the Rules

I’m going to share with you now a poem that breaks some rules. You are welcome to hate it—several of my friends did—but let me at least tell you why I love it, too.

“Glove Money” by Sophia Dahlin

Retrieved from The Yale Review.

The Broken Rules of Poetry

Let me acknowledge the rules that this poem is breaking:

1. Effective line breaks and end-words—that first stanza uses some form of the word “hand” as the end-word 4 times. The second stanza has more variations on hands, palms, gloves, etc. as its end-words.
2. No Ideas But In Things—There are a few times when I feel like the speaker is interpreting images for me, like in the line “I mean when I despised my own thin / smallboned chest”.
3. Avoid redundancy—that first stanza in particular expresses the same idea in a number of ways, but the idea itself doesn’t evolve much. Nor is the amplifying effect all that significant, except maybe to highlight some sort of absurd feeling around money.
4. Seek aesthetic unity—What is with this poem’s weird diversions? First the fun fact about “cashier”, then Lance Armstrong (????), and then that third stanza, which has, on a first read, zero relationship to the first two stanzas.

It’s this last rule that, I think, is the most divisive in this poem. I run a poetry writing group and recently used this as a model poem for one of our prompts. About half of the group appreciated the poem’s zaniness; the other half said, among other things, that The Yale Review “must be going downhill.”

I, for one, love this poem. It is basically two poems in a trench coat, with that break between the second and third stanza being comically, cosmically large. The poem leaps across that break on wobbly footing, and what we end up with is a poem that, to use Dahlin’s own words, “would drive a workshop insane.”

What that giant leap did for me is make me pay really close attention to how these two seemingly unrelated sections are connected. A fun exercise you could even do is reread the poem without the first two stanzas, so that it is just “Glove Money // Once, before I knew I was a kind of / lesbian…”

What I notice, then, is a number of really interesting binaries. For example:

The poem is also, I think, linked by a fear of touch. In the first two stanzas, the speaker desires gloves because they do not want to touch money, but the speaker also mentions not wanting to touch other peoples’ hands if those hands have touched money, resulting in a kind of fear-by-proxy—that we are stained and tarnished by money, and our touch, thus, is tainted. 

But then the third stanza contains a different fear, the kind of sublime fear that informs erotic desire: to touch the object of our wanting and thus be irrevocably transformed by touching that object. (Or, by being unable to touch it.)

As for the other rules this poem breaks, I think the poem maintains its unique voice and perspective because it eschews those rules. I much prefer a poem whose voice adds texture to the contemporary canon—rather than a poem who blends in so seamlessly with contemporary aesthetics that it is, ultimately, forgettable.

Other Poems That Break the Rules of Poetry

Here are links to some other poems that, I think, break some 21st century rules of poetry—and are all the more better for them.

• “Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower” by Bradley Trumpfheller 
  • A poem that could be described as excessively sentimental. 
• “Death, Yes, Life” by Lily Greenberg
  • There’s no explicit rule that you can’t mention the craft elements of poetry within a poem itself, but I find it daring that this poem tells the reader that its images are not metaphors or symbols—a controversial act of interpreting itself to the reader.
• “Prayer” by Galway Kinnell 
  • Poems that try to be universal usually falter—it’s much easier to find the universal in the particular. But this poem’s vast, abstract appreciation for what is does, indeed, feel like a prayer. 
• “The Problem of Writing Poems in the Shape of Deciduous Trees” by Brian Bilston
  • Shape-based poems are usually kind of gauche—overly constricting language and relying on geometry to convey thought. And this one is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek pun… and yet, I’m charmed somehow. 
• “Poem” by Alice Notley
  • Poem, in general, makes for a horrible title for a poem. We know it’s a poem. We see the poem on the page. What a waste of language space! And yet… the “anonymity” of this Poem poem somehow makes Poem a fitting poem title. 

Tips For Breaking The Rules of Poetry

If you write poems that follow the rules, great! If you want to break those rules, that’s great, too. Here are a few pieces of advice:

Break the Rules of Poetry With Intention

If you laugh at a funeral, people will notice. Similarly, if you do something in a poem that goes against convention, it will draw the reader’s attention towards that broken convention. You don’t want to commit a faux pas. 

What this means is, if you plan to do something against-the-grain in a poem, it should be done with artistic intent. Disliking the rule is perfectly fine, but breaking it must come with some sort of creative purpose.

For example, if all of your lines end on weak words, don’t do it just because you hate concrete language. Do it because it contributes to the poem’s meaning. A great example of this exact broken rule is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”, whose weak end words signify a weakness of selfhood and identity in the poem’s hooky subjects:

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Follow the Logic of Your Voice

When a poem breaks a rule successfully, its success is found in the uniqueness of the poet’s own voice. 

This advice is a lot easier said than done. How do you measure voice? How do you know when to follow it, and how do you follow it? 

What “voice” is is the inimitable quality of your work, which can only be honed through your own unique relationship to language. It means avoiding cliché, figuring out your own perspective on the world, and finding the best language to transmit that perspective. These things can’t really be taught—they are honed simply through the poet’s practice—but the more you know your voice, the easier it will be to break the rules in favor of your own art. 

Read Rule Breaking Poetry 

My favorite poems are the ones that make me think, you can do that in a poem? 

The more poetry you read and encounter, the more likely you are to encounter this same reaction, and the more you will want to write poems that challenge the limits of language.

Here’s a poem I read recently that gave me the above response—I love it for its speaker-as-observer lens and its wandering, universal humanity. Retrieved here.

Everything All at Once by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Interrogate the Rules As You’re Using Them

Why does this line need to be broken on the verb? What’s wrong with using the word “soul” in this stanza? Why can’t I cry in my own poem about death? 

Oftentimes, these questions have obvious answers, but sometimes they don’t. And it’s those moments when the reason for the rule isn’t apparent that are windows into further possibility. The rules exist to help you write successful poetry, but when the poem feels more successful without the constraint of those rules, opt to break them instead. 

One Last Thing…

I really like this article from LitHub about the capital-C Craft of literature, and when to ignore Craft rules. It’s written for a fiction writing audience, but I think a lot of the notes and ideas presented here are equally applicable to poets: 

https://lithub.com/25-essential-notes-on-craft-from-matthew-salesses/

More Advice on Writing Poetry

Here are more articles, guides, and resources for writing successful poetry:

• How to Write a Poem
• What is Poetry?
• How to Start a Poem 
• Finding Poetry Inspiration
• Becoming a Poet

Break the Rules of Poetry at Writers.com 

At Writers.com, we teach the rules just as often as we break them. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry writing courses, where you’ll receive expert feedback and instruction on every poem you write.