after Rainer Maria Rilke
Dear Sir,
First of all, your poetry would greatly benefit from being better. It would be to its advantage to be assembled with more appropriate words, in a better order than you have them. Also, those words need to be correctly spelled and to mean the things you intend them to mean.
Believing that they mean the things you intend them to mean is not the same thing as them meaning them.
There are several things a successful poem should be, but one of them is not no good.
The poet ought to be familiar with what has gone before. Like, for instance, poetry written by people who know how to do it.
A useful starting point might be to imagine something that has been said, then attempt to express it better. Not to think of something that has never been said because it is pointless, then to phrase it worse than any living human being, even those unfamiliar with the language, could.
The subject of your first effort appears to be a mystical race of winged angel-people who save a place called Kraalgorn. Kraalgorn is not a thing. Perhaps there is a book you might buy that contains a list of things that are actual things. I suggest looking up one of these things and writing about that instead.
The poet ought not to try to rhyme “universal” with “fanciful.” It doesn’t go. It will not fit. There simply is no rhyme in it.
See how that is done? Do that.
The poet’s verses ought to remind a first-time reader of (perhaps) Yeats, Carson, Bishop, Plath, Larkin. Milne, even, or Thomas or cummings. Not of the small type in the print ad for a mattress sale.
Trees have been described a lot of times by good poets. Unless you find a particularly unusual one, there is no reason to describe more trees. Give trees a rest.
Mean things. When you put words together in a sentence, have the cumulative effect be to state something that can be interpreted. For instance: “Clouds today abound.” Each word of this observation adds meaning. Compare this with “optimism’s mustache / barks condescendingly.” (I have here corrected your spelling of the first and terminal words) There is no meaning in this, if by meaning we mean something that actually has a meaning.
Don’t use the word holistic in a poem. I will honest to God come over there and I will slap you.
Learn punctuation. A sentence cannot be concluded with three semi-colons, any more than one may end a bridge by branching it off in three directions and stopping them all in the middle of a river. The “new effect” you describe in your cover letter has not been tried in previous poems because the writers of the previous poems knew how to write poems.
Write the poem for its own sake. Feel it breathe, feel it speak. Do not attach a note asking if the recipient knows of “any place that might pay $25” for it. $25 is not a price one pays for a poem, even a good one, let alone one about an old dog who has lost his mind and begun eating everything, if I may read this into your second effort, which I quit upon encountering the word convosation.
When writing metrical verse, count the syllables and attempt to get the same number in subsequent lines, with the “downbeats” in the same places. If you have eight beats in a line, attempt to get eight in the next. Ten is not eight. Thirteen, God help us, is not eight. Thirteen syllables does not “equal” eight syllables even if you say them fast. Tap the syllables with your foot, or feet if you have two. Count them on your fingers. I know of no simpler way to express this. If you cannot reliably, repeatedly count to eight, perhaps metrical poetry is not for you.
On the other hand, even blank verse ought to have more novelty, more original feeling, than a Nigerian scam email.
Regarding your third effort: no sensitive person doubts that your niece is wonderful. Do not set poetry the difficult task of convincing those who might scurrilously doubt such a thing that they are in the wrong.
A few particulars, if I may:
“Dacshunds” (sic) are not a type of shoe. They are a dog. I would have thought that you, an apparent dog owner, would know this. I believe you were thinking of moccasins. Which also do not rhyme with “maximum,” in that they are plural, and additionally that they don’t rhyme with it.
The Second World War did not precede the first, as the last line of your sonnet implies. Look it up and you will see I am right about this.
The classical sonnet has 14 lines, not 117.
When I spoke to your composition class I said I welcomed the chance to read all of your efforts, at any time. I must amend that statement. I am moving to Baffin Island. There is no wifi on Baffin Island. Maybe you could write about that, albeit not to me.
Yours, etc.
