What Makes Great Poetry?

What Makes Great Poetry? “That is a complex question,” Holper replied, “but on a simple level, it’s a stirring of emotions within us. Something that taps into that part of us that lives under the surface just waiting to be awoken. And it comes from details, or sound, or voice.” It’s an immediate recognition, Holper said, “When it’s just kind of dead on the page or dead through performance, you can see the difference between what’s powerful and what’s not.” Holper works to pass on what might seem like an intuitive skill to his students. “When I train student editors for the literary journal for College of the Redwoods, I just tell them, if you read it and it doesn’t do anything for you, just pass it by, you’re just looking for the things that really speak to you on some level. I think poet laureate Billy Collins, in an interview a few years ago, said that ‘Poetry was the emotional history of the human race.’ And I think that’s a keen observation. It’s simple in a certain way, but it is, it’s the emotional history of our species.” There’s also a personal connection. “I like a poet to find a way to articulate something I’ve sensed or intuited or thought myself, but I’ve never put to words before. Or, give me a new insight into something that I saw, that I kind of maybe sensed, but I have never (really given voice to). “I love poems that take something that’s rather ordinary and make it extraordinary. I think that’s really the poet’s job. And that’s when a poem is really great, when what’s ordinary, that what we observe daily, becomes extraordinary, and the poet is able to take that and show us what is extraordinary in it.” “Fear, in and of itself, isn’t enough to stop people from living life,” said Burns, “but it’s the fear of fear that gets in the way. I’m trying to show people that you don’t have to be afraid of fear. It’s still going to be there, but we can recognize it, give it its space, but tell it, ‘OK you’re going to sit down now, because it’s my source of power’s turn to express itself’.” That power, said Burns, is what makes great poetry. “For me, it’s when I can tell that person is in their power. When they have found their voice and they have found their source of power, and are writing from that space. Authenticity, vulnerability and openness. And the creative factor and writing styles. But to me that’s not as important.” So what makes great poetry? “A clever use of language, and clever meaning - that it’s crafted very deliberately. I think really powerful poetry evokes something in the reader. It helps the reader to put words to an experience or feeling that the reader may have had, so I think those are two things that I look for and struggle to accomplish in my own work.” Curiel added, “I think a lot of (my poetry) is accessible and accessibility is important in poetry - that it’s not overly intellectual or abstract.” A good poem “works in multiple registers.” “You can’t fake it. I try to teach them that.” said Martien, talking of his students. “It’s given,” he says of good poetry, “like when you hit a really good lick in music, not something premeditated - it just comes out, the best poems are like that.” He added, “great audiences make great poetry.” “I can’t stay silent when I see the kind of outrages that are in our face all day, like the way homeless people are treated of this city,” he said. “It’s a crying shame. And poets are the ones’ doing the crying.” “Somebody has to speak for them.” Martien continued, “The same as somebody has to speak for forests, and endangered species, and endangered rivers, and for all of these things that have no voice. I feel like it’s the poet’s job to try to give them voice.” What makes a great poem? “I love a poem that offers up so many striking images that you are very sure of what this poet is offering up,” Suskin said. “And have at least a single line that strikes me so deeply that I have to put my hand on my chest and take a deep breath. The greatness of a poem can be this small moment that does that to you. … It draws your spirit into whatever the poet is talking about.” Suskin explains, “I’m very much about accessibility in my own writing, so I appreciate that in others.” “You have to know who you’re writing for” she explained. “If you don’t know then you won’t know how to edit your work. If you’re writing just for yourself, it may not matter,” she continued, “but if you’re writing for the whole world you have to speak in a language for everyone, and in a really accessible way. You have to try really hard and edit really heavily to do that.” Quotes from College of the Redwoods Writing Professor David Holper, Human Expression Open Mic Host and gifted slam poet Courtnie Burns, Humboldt State University Writing Professors Barbara Curiel and Jerry Martien, and nationally recognized Poem Store poet Jacqueline Suskin Brought to you courtesy of the Mad River Union newspaper, Arcata, CA