Bless me oh poetry gods, for I have sinned. I gave my poem a boring, abstract title that even made me lose interest in it. How many poems have you seen with a title like ‘Love’, ‘Justice’, or ‘Morning’? Your brain is left scrambling even before you dive into the poem. It may set up expectations your poem doesn’t deliver. Worst of all is the dreaded, ‘Untitled’. Not only does it miss an opportunity to…
It all sounds so easy. Write poetry. Organize your poetry into book format. Submit chapbook. Profit! Well, maybe not the last one. We all know how much poetry pays. Sometimes it’s tempting to fold poems into paper airplanes and send them out into the world. I favor the “tie a poem to a balloon and send it aloft” method, but that’s bad for the environment. So, what to do with all those poems? First, print…
One thing we see a lot of here at Gyroscope Review is a good poem—that suddenly goes wrong. In their haste to put a tidy bow at the end of the poem, the poet wraps it up with a cliché. Instead of ending strong and leaving the reader to marvel at the deft wording, the poet tries to evoke the emotion they want us to feel with a stock image/phrase. It doesn’t work. The reader…
Although I’ve been writing poetry as best I can of late, I felt my output wasn’t where it should be. The state of the world had me flummoxed. My poems were scattered in theme and many felt unfinished even when completed— a sort of bookish throat-clearing that happens periodically as I flail about, searching. I needed to move out of the ‘any half-assed written down poem is a good thing’ mentality. As a way of…
