Make Your Poetry Unique (My Top 3 Tips)

Today I thought I’d explore ways to make your poetry unique. This has been a long and steep learning curve for me.

I had to rid myself of a lot of expectations — how I expected my poetry to be, how I wanted it to be. Of course, I still write the poetry I love, but nowadays I pay attention to how I am using language far more.

So, let’s get into the three tips.

1. Check For Unoriginal Language

You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to create an unoriginal poem. In fact, it’s damn near impossible to create a love poem that’s in any way original these days.

We all slip back into pure romanticism — it’s familiar. That’s why checking for unoriginal language (or lines) is so important.

I don’t just mean, “roses are red, violets are blue…” But any language/lines that may provide us with a feeling of too much familiarity. For example, it’s nice to say, “Your soul reflects beauty as water reflects light.” But it feels same-old. It’s nice, but it’s not original or unique. It’s actually a bit trite.

Oftentimes, surrealism captures something unique…But it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to love poetry. Nonetheless, you can use certain slightly unusual ideas to portray your love in a unique way. In one poem of mine, entitled 'I Love You Like Toast', l tried to link love with eating toast.

Poetry often takes a little time and thought to make unique. Poetry is a feeling art primarily, but when we negate thinking, we can sometimes produce slightly more unoriginal poetry. The overemphasis on emotion can make the expression too unoriginal, so it’s always worth considering your poetry in terms of originality of expression.

2. Use Original Word Combinations

This point is of course highly related to the first: we are still concerned deeply with originality.

Perhaps surrealism is the perfect example here. In surrealism, it is about creating something ‘weird that fits’. Surrealism isn’t just weird for weird’s sake, but there’s some odd form of sense to the words that is almost indescribable.

If we do feel this ‘sense of no sense’, it is certainly from original combinations of words that create a sort of ‘surreal sense’. Below is an excerpt from my poem ‘Instinctive Pressure’. The words are totally bizarre and nonsensical, yet the stanza does have a sort of flow and sense of its own.

“Time itself brings light to reason,

caught by the harpies that manifest our murder,

bleating with the shape of a zebra,

snatching heroes from under the spires of the spirit.”

There’s a sort of ‘authoritarian-philosophical’ tone that holds some sense for us, and which makes the craziness of the words a little easier to digest despite them being in an unusual, original combination.

It’s definitely important to play around with original combinations of words. It doesn’t have to be as surreal as above…It could simply be original combinations of words that make complete sense in a nature poem. Having original sentences can really contribute to the fresh feel of a poem.

3. Study The History of Poetry

This is a shorter point, but certainly a very important one.

If you study the history of poetry, you’ll be able to see the development (and preferential treatment) of different styles over the centuries. Why is this important? Because you can understand what modern poetry is in relation to other eras of poetry: romanticism, symbolism, modernism etc.

This helps you to create unique, 21st-century poetry as opposed to simply ‘redoing a past era’. This type of study also allows you to form new, hybrid poetic styles. For example, you could read the romanticists and the contemporary poets, then you could form a new style from this… ‘contemporary romanticism’.

You could take the structuralist elements of contemporary poetry and unify these with romantic expression. Your work may then read as contemporary (in form) with hints of romanticism (in feeling).

So you may see from this quite how important studying the history of poetry can be. It is of immense value for creating something new, fresh, and unique.

Anyway, those are all my points for today. Thank you for reading and I hope this post provided you with a lot of value.

Adz