In the Kingdom of Letters, a strange affliction has taken root: an ailment of the spirit that seeks certainty as a beggar seeks crumbs beneath a banquet table. It is a disease of those who fear the abyss and so invent formulas, clinging to them as a drowning man clings to a plank of driftwood.
The recent manifesto from PoetrySoup, that “treatise” of literary devices and numbered commandments, is nothing but a symptom of this malady: a bureaucratic attempt to dissect the nightingale’s song with the scalpel of a clerk.
They ask: Can a poem’s worth be calculated in “emotional depth”? as though the heart’s hemorrhage could be taxed by the state treasury. They inquire whether metaphor might submit to checklists, like a timid schoolchild lining up before a headmaster. These are not questions of poets, but of scribes who have mistaken the sacred tremor of poetry for the sterile pulse of a ledger.
The text reads with the solemnity of a user’s manual for assembling plastic flowers: “Glue the petal here, adjust the stem there”, a mechanical beauty, devoid of scent, devoid of wilt. Thus is poetry reduced to a toolbox: concise language, vivid imagery, emotional depth, as if the poet were a humble carpenter, hammering chairs for the banquet of polite applause. Yet poetry is no servant of banquet halls; it is the ghost that wanders through the attic of human frailty, whispering secrets into cracked mirrors.
To speak of “steps” toward poetry is to mistake the spiral staircase of the soul for a fire escape. Poetry cannot be taught in bullet points; it is born in the disheveled silences between breaths, in the place where language itself fears to tread. It is not a recipe for housecooks or a craft for shopkeepers. It is a wound, and from that wound, uninvited, unplanned, the poem bleeds.
They preach about “connection,” as though poetry were a handshake, a courteous nod across a well-lit room. But poetry is no gentle agreement. It is a scream hurled into the void, and sometimes, only sometimes, the void screams back. The poem does not seek to comfort; it seeks to unsettle, to exhume the buried bones of unease that society so carefully conceals beneath polite conversation.
What folly it is to offer “10 Steps to Great Poetry”! - as though one might build a ladder of smoke to reach the moon. Poetry inhabits the silences that follow the last line; it is the quiver in the voice that does not speak. There is no formula to catch a snowflake’s melting, no checklist to harness a storm.
Those who write guides on “how to write poetry” have never known the terror of a blank page at midnight, when the shadows begin to breathe. They have never bartered sleep for a single honest verse. Poetry is not a trade; it is a crucifixion, a calling that demands not mastery, but surrender.
A poem is not engineered; it escapes. It does not ascend by scaffold, but erupts like a volcano in the breast. To reduce it to “literary devices” is to sketch the wings of a swan on a napkin and believe it will fly. Metaphor is not an accessory, a brooch pinned to a lifeless dress, it is a spark born from the collision of a poet’s fracture and the world’s indifference.
When they ask, “Does a successful poem resonate with readers?” they betray their merchant’s heart, believing poetry to be a transaction, a contract of mutual satisfaction. But poetry was never meant to please. It was meant to wound, to carve open the hush of existence and reveal the trembling heart beneath. The poet’s task is not success; it is indispensability.
And when the article ponders, “Ultimately, a good poem connects with its audience, but what else is needed?” it reveals its ultimate blindness: the belief that poetry is a dialogue, a courteous exchange of pleasantries. Poetry is a monologue whispered into the abyss, and on rare, blessed nights, the abyss dares to whisper back.
Poetry is not learned. It is suffered. It is lived. It is plucked from the darkness by hands trembling with sleeplessness.