3 words that could be red flags for your poems

I’ve been sifting for a major poetry prize. Here are 3 words that often appear in poems that don’t make it to the shortlist.

When I was at university, one of my tutors told me about the ‘banned words list’. This wasn’t a physical list you could consult, but a generally understood list of words that shouldn’t be used in a poem – usually because they’d been overused and were now accepted to be cliched in their own right.

Except of course, how could you know if a word was on the ‘banned’ list if you were a writer just starting out? And why should common usage of a word render it unusable to everyone else?

(If you’re interested, words on the ‘banned list’ included ‘shard’, ‘soul’ and ‘marram grass’.)

In case it isn’t clear, I don’t believe in having a banned words list. In fairness, I’m not sure the tutor did either; I think it was just his way of trying to encourage us to think outside the box.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about that list a lot. I’ve been sifting for a major poetry prize, reading over a thousand poems in a short space of time. And I’ve noticed three words that crop up again and again in poems that don’t make it through to the shortlisting stage.

That isn’t to say you should never use any of these words. As I say, I don’t believe in having a ‘banned words’ list. Besides, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these words in isolation.

But they are often indicative of a wider problem with the poem.

Think of them as flags, signalling something deeper buried below the surface. If you have one of these words in your poem, you definitely don’t have to take it out. But it might be worth looking at what it’s indicative of, and whether that’s really what you intended.

So, with the caveat that each poem is absolutely your own and you definitely don’t have to listen to me if this doesn’t ring true for your poem, here are three words that often appear in poems that don’t make it past the first round of a competition:

---

1 – thus

When I was at school, we did a charity fundraising project, and wrote a little piece about it for the local paper. This piece contained the word ‘thus’. (We were teenagers learning to write essays; the word ‘thus’ was the height of sophistication and intellectualism.) The piece then went to an editor at the local paper, who chopped it up and turned it into a proper article, turning bits of it into quotes which she assigned to us as the group members. I was quoted as having said the bit containing ‘thus’.

Needless to say, everyone took the piss out of me when it appeared in the paper. Why? Because nobody really actually says thus. Not in everyday speech.

And yet you’d be amazed at how often it crops up in poems.

Now obviously I’m not saying that all poetry has to sound like everyday speech. Of course not – there are as many different types of voice as there are poem. (If you want to think more about voice in poetry, check out Tony Hoagland’s excellent The Art of Voice.)¹

But the word ‘thus’ is often used in an essay-style summing up. As in, here is my evidence, therefore this is my conclusion.

All well-and-good in an essay, but I’ve found the best poems don’t tie themselves up with a little bow that tells us what to think. I’ve found that the best poems leave room for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

(An obvious exception to this is Shakespeare’s sonnets, which very often do come to some sort of conclusion, often in a rhyming couplet. But he gets a free pass, for starters because he’s Shakespeare, but also because he was writing four hundred years ago, and poetic conventions have changed since then. And yes, you can absolutely write your own sonnets that draw conclusions at the end of them, but I’m betting it won’t include the word ‘thus’. Not unless you’re deliberately mimicking a 400-year-old writing style – and if you are, why? Unless you also go about your daily life in doublet and hose, in which case, I guess you don’t need a reason.)

Which brings me onto word number two…

---