I talk a lot about emotion in these blog-posts and the reason is because all good art, particularly poetry, is made of emotion. If you aren't willing to express emotion intensely, there's really not much point in trying to be a poet.

The same is true if you just want to express one emotion over and over. If your poems are always happy or always sad, people will get bored with your work fast. 

The best thing you can do is to use a lot of different emotions, even in a single poem. I could cite hundreds of examples here, but let's just focus on two really famous poems. The first is "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe and the second is "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath. 

Sure, "The Raven" is famous for being synonymous for mourning, and rightly so, but if you look at the poem carefully you'll see it actually runs a gamut of emotions from boredom, to hope, to anger, and terror. Unrelenting grief is only one emotion, and it's profound, centuries strong sadness would not ring as fully as it does without a compliment of contrasting colors.

Plath's poem is even more dynamic. It starts with submissive emotions of fear and self-loathing and rises to emotions that are best described as "godly." Along the way, Plath uses sarcasm, honesty, pity, anger, joy, and nostalgia to fuel her transformation from victim to avenging Goddess.

That's what you want to do with emotion in a poem. You want to use it as both color and tempo simultaneously and you want to color with more than one crayon and keep time on more than a single drum.

Tally
Poems Written: 308
Submissions: 51
Rejections:  20 (13 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Sisters"   
  

Should you ever just give up on a poem?

Some poems come out almost fully formed, just perfect straight out of the fire, like a gift from  from the gods. Others have to be wrangled, sawed, sanded, polished and, in some cases, given a full body-transplant. What makes it worse is, a poem can be this close to brilliance and then it takes months and sometimes years to actually get it right. 

So you have a decision to make as a poet. Luckily, you get the chance to make the decision over and over. Basically, what you have to decide with each poem is:  how much can revision help? Usually the answer is: a lot. Even if you only make small changes or a small change to a given poem, the results can be dramatic.

There are times, though, when you just have to let go.

Some poems just fail.

Unfortunately, there's no rule when it comes to making this judgment call. And it's liable to be different, in any case, for each poem. Given, these vagaries, here's a few points that I've found helpful over the years:

• It's way easier, like 200% easier, to revise a poem you haven't looked at in a while. This is hard to do because we all get attached to and exacted about our latest work, but this is the single most effective revision strategy I know. 
• Making revisions after you've published or posted the poem is permissible but it looks really bad and you can avoid it by simply following the first point above.
• Sometimes the needed revision takes your poem in a surprising direction, maybe even away from what you originally intended.  Just let it happen. 
• It's much more common to need to take things out of a draft than add them.
• Revision is fun and rewarding if you can accept it as part of the process.
• If you've tried a few times to revise a poem and it's not going anywhere, set it aside. You don't have to throw it away, just use it to harvest lines and words and ideas for other poems and other revisions. It's legal to steal from yourself.

​I also have a thought on not revising or refusing to revise your poems: that's why your poems aren't working for anyone else but you.

So do your poems a favor and shine them as best you can.

If you hate revising and polishing, consider two options (best used together!):

1) Have me do it for you! Click the "Poem Polisher" button below. I've helped lots of poets.
2) Use my 7 Secrets of Poetry pdf as a guide for revision.

Tally
Poems Written: 307
Submissions: 51
Rejections:  20 (13 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Street Steel"