Sympathetic Sybil is Write Out Loud's own Agony Aunt, send your problem to sybil@writeoutloud.net

Dear Dame Sybil,

I’ve been writing and performing poetry for a couple of years now but am becoming increasingly concerned that I simply don’t know how good my poetry is.

People tell me they like some of my offerings though I often find that they are praising work that I don’t consider very good, yet the poems I put my heart and soul into get no feedback at all.

 So dear Aunty, how can I tell what is good in my poetry and what is not?

Anxious Arthur (pseudonym i.e. not my real name)

Oh dear ‘Arthur’,

How does one assess one’s own poetry?

Of course some of us simply know that we are great poets before we even pick up a pen. I, for instance, was born a great poet. Mater told me, before her untimely death in a tumble drier, that nurse had informed her I was spouting intense, complicated poetry before I could actually speak words, obviously I was one of the chosen, so for me this is a difficult question to answer.

However, from what I can gather from some of the struggling poets I’ve met, one should start by trying to assess one’s own poetry with that of one’s peers. Buy their little books of verse and look at how they construct poems, how they work with words, avoid clichés, create imaginative imagery and unexpected rhymes within a rhythmic structure that is pleasing to the ear.

Read their poems aloud and note if the verse scans, flows and doesn’t jar or cause one to wince. Now look at your own work and attempt to undertake a similar impartial analysis.

This is impossible of course, because most poets cannot judge their own work, they assume that as they’ve written it, it must obviously be excellent and have a universal meaning and appeal and should be appreciated as such.

Well, my dears, you could be wrong. Yes, your family & friends may praise you and appreciate your worth but try sending your work off to publications you think might appreciate it and you could be in for a shock.

Or stand up in a room full of strangers and recite your masterpieces and be underwhelmed with the response.

It may well be that one is ahead of one’s time and that one’s poems aren’t being appreciated by the intellectual thickos because they don’t get it. I certainly found this to be the case with my poetry.

Eventually the only test that counts is how you are judged by posterity. Many giants of the literary world (such as G. M. Hopkins, Kafka and myself) were virtually unknown in their own lifetime.

So, once you have a body of work one is proud of then is the time to lie down, die and trust that your genius will shine down the generations.

Hope this helps

Sybil