The Poetry Checklist
This week I found a few interesting checklists online for writing poems. Now I don't know any poets who actually use checklists to write or read poems, but I took a look anyway (maybe they'd be good for a friend or relative struggling through a literature class).
This first one is a checklist primarily for explication of poems: http://www.longwoodshakespeare.org/handouts/explication.pdf
However, it's so temping to want to read this list as a poet and feel you need to keep all these balls in the air when writing each poem. Which is crippling.
Better to focus on one or two skills at a time and let those seep under your skin and then move on, skill by skill. Then, one fine day, all skills will pull together for a masterpiece. It's inevitable, right?
Next, the Practical Poet has posted a checklist for Haiku: https://sites.google.com/site/graceguts/essays/practical-poet-creating-a-haiku-checklist
And here is yet another list formatted in an unattractive table:
http://www.huntel.net/rsweetland/literature/genre/poetry/checklistEvaluate.html
In some kind of freudian slip, I saved the checklist graphic for this post as "hecklist." But I don't want to heckle these checklists. I'm an obsessive list-maker myself. There are good things to draw from such orderliness and making your own lists here and there will be useful in organizing our thoughts. And a good thought is the gold at the top of anybody's checklist. Writing is only as good as your thinking. We always forget that. You can't string together a well-crafted poem without well-crafted thinking.
So if list-making scratches that hamster-on-the-wheel-in-your-head, it's a good thing.
Does your poem have utility?
In fact, I found the last item on all these lists to be the most worthy of consideration and reconsideration. Nobody talks about it much but it really is the most crucial force in determining a poem that succeeds with readers and a poem that doesn't:
Does it have ideas people can use?
Be honest. Does you poem have ideas people can use?
