Common Poetry Mistakes: Clichés, Abstraction, and Forced Rhyme

Every poetry editor has read the same poem a hundred times. A heart shatters like glass. A soul drifts on an ocean of emotion. The final couplet rhymes because it has to, and the meaning bends to fit. None of this means the writer has no talent. It usually means the draft is doing what drafts do: reaching for the nearest available phrase and stopping there.

The three habits below cause most of the damage in beginner poems. All three are fixable in a single sitting at the kitchen table, with a pencil and a bit of ruthlessness.

Clichés: the phrases that arrive before you do

A cliché is not the mark of a lazy writer. It is the mark of a fast one. The brain, asked for an image of grief, hands over tears like rain because that phrase is already filed and ready. It costs you nothing to write, and it costs the reader nothing to read. That is precisely the problem.

Here are the usual suspects, in no particular order:

• my heart shattered / broke into pieces
• tears streamed down my face
• a whirlwind of emotions
• time stood still
• the wind whispered through the trees
• a love like no other
• drowning in a sea of despair

Notice how many of them are metaphors everyone already owns. The reader sees the phrase, not the thing it was meant to describe.

The fix is not to write something more poetic. It is to write something more particular. Replace my heart shattered with the detail you would never think to mention: setting out two mugs and remembering only one of them gets used. Replace a whirlwind of emotions with what your hands were actually doing. One true detail will carry more weight than three decorative ones.

A useful test: if the line could appear on a greetings card without anyone noticing, it needs work. Clichés can be used on purpose, with irony, but the poem has to signal that it knows what it is doing. Otherwise, trust the reader to assume you meant it.

Abstraction: naming a feeling is not the same as making one

Abstraction is the cousin of cliché and often arrives in the same draft. It looks like this:

Sadness filled my soul as I walked through the empty house.

Every word there is doing the same job twice. Sadness tells us the emotion. Filled my soul insists on it. Empty house gestures at atmosphere but stays general enough to belong to anyone.

Abstractions are words you cannot photograph: love, hope, eternity, despair, freedom, the human condition. They are real things, and they matter, but they are conclusions. A poem earns them by showing the reader the evidence first.

A quick test for abstraction

1. Underline every abstract noun in the draft.
2. Next to each one, write the concrete thing that made you feel it. Grief might be his slippers still by the door. Hope might be the first crocus coming up beside a skip.
3. Swap the abstract noun for the concrete detail, or move the detail earlier and let the abstract word land at the end, once, where it will hit harder.

Used sparingly, abstraction is powerful. A poem that has given us forty small, sharp particulars can afford one line like and that was grief. The word arrives loaded. What kills a poem is abstraction doing the work that images should be doing.

Forced rhyme and the poems it ruins

Rhyme is a pleasure, not an obligation. When it starts making decisions, the poem wobbles. You can hear it happening:

My heart is full of love for you,
A love so strong, so pure, so true.

Nothing is wrong with the sentiment. Everything is wrong with the second line, which exists to complete a rhyme and adds so strong, so pure, so true because the metre needed filling. The reader can feel the machinery.

Other symptoms of rhyme in charge:

• Word order going strange to reach the rhyme: upon the hill I saw the tree / and thought of all that used to be.
• Filler adverbs and archaic diction: e'er, o'er, doth, tis, ne'er. If you would not say it out loud to a friend, it does not belong in the poem.
• Rhyming on the least important words, usually line-ending verbs and pronouns, while the real subject sits in the middle of the line being ignored.
• A closing couplet that announces a conclusion the poem has not earned, because the rhyme demanded a neat ending.

What to do instead

1. Write the second line first. Decide what the stanza actually needs to say, find the strongest word in it, and build the rhyme around that word rather than the other way round.
2. Try slant rhyme. Near rhymes – grief and give, dusk and ask, moon and mine – sound contemporary and give you far more room to mean what you meant.
3. Bury the rhyme inside the line. Internal rhyme lets you keep the music while freeing the line ending for meaning.
4. Cut the rhyme from the stanza entirely. A poem can be unrhymed throughout, with two or three rhymes kept for the moments that matter. Restraint makes them ring.
5. Ask what the rhyme is paying for. If it costs you a clear sentence, it is not worth it.

How to revise a draft without flattening it

Revision is not tidying. It is deciding what the poem is for, then removing anything that gets in the way. A workable pass, in order:

1. Read the poem aloud, slowly, standing up. Your ear catches what your eye forgives: padded syllables, wobbly metre, lines that run out of breath.
2. Cut the first line and see what happens. Many poems begin one or two lines before they should, with a warm-up the reader does not need.
3. Circle every abstraction and every cliché. Replace at least two-thirds of them with something only you could have written.
4. Mark the rhyme words. Ask whether the poem would survive without each one. Remove the ones it would.
5. Check the verbs. Strong, plain verbs do more work than any number of adjectives. If a line leans on very or so, the verb is probably weak.
6. Leave it alone for a week. Come back and read it cold. Whatever you skim is what a reader will skim.

A short checklist before you call it finished

• Can the reader see, hear or touch at least one thing in every stanza?
• Is each rhyme doing a job, or is the poem doing a job for the rhyme?
• Would you say every line out loud to a real person?
• Does the ending follow from the poem, or from the shape you wanted it to have?
• If you removed the title, would the poem still know what it is about?

Get into the habit of running these checks on your own drafts and the three problems stop appearing so often. Not because you have learnt a rule, but because you have started hearing your own poem the way a stranger will. That is the whole skill, and it only improves with practice.

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