Elements of Poetry
Two key elements of poetry are order and substance. The poem must exist to be good; imagine a logarithmic curve that plateaus after some time. The y-axis would be the “poeticness” or the “goodness” of the poetry. A very short poem will struggle to evoke anything at all because it has so little time and space to do so. Of course, this definition of a short poem has not yet been strictly defined, and that is unnecessary for the moment, but say about 5 lines is the minimum required to make this graph plateau, to reach a reasonable place of a great possibility to do good as a poem. Before this, it has a higher chance to struggle. And the number of words should be decent as well. Of course, this is a very theoretical approach, and there are many exceptions; this is why it is a theory of reasonable chance.
Besides the poem having substance, it needs order. It needs to take you to this world that is so far away, and as explained previously, it needs time to get there. In order to take you to that world, you need direction. This is typically done through stanzas, rhyming, any traditional formatting. In contemporary and slam poetry, it is somewhat more difficult, since many of these rules have been thrown out the window. So, I will say that this type of poetry uses a scatter-bland method, where the poem will either absolutely diverge and scatter over different things extremely quickly, or it will read like non-lyricized literature. Basically, it is the two extremes of order. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but modern society has had too much fun with not trying hard enough when it comes to poetry, and so it has become incredibly difficult for many people to find “good” poetry among the world’s collection of verses due to contemporary trends.
The modern poetic climate has left me feeling under the weather; few writers have truly captured the raw emotions and stories of life into contemporary poetry effectively, and for those who were able to, I commend you. Sometimes it can be more difficult than with greater order. But regardless if you write traditionally or otherwise, order is required, to, in some entertaining way, take the mind to the desired destination. And this must be done with decent substance and correct order.
*This is also not to say that a poem with great order and substance is necessarily good. Simply put, greater order and substance tends to magnify the quality of poetry. Yet there are so many other nuances, and it is subjective, after all.
