applause, applause, life is our cause

Anonymous asked: how are poems graded at oberlin? if you boil down a poem to be objectively gradable, what are the important criteria? I've always been curious. Whats the difference (in your opinion, the opinion of your peers, or the opinion of your professor) between one of your check poems vs a check plus?

Well, let me preface all this by saying that I’ve only had one creative writing teacher here, and I’m guessing all the professors evaluate work differently based both on their academic styles and personal tastes. But from what I’ve seen in my evolving work and the work my peers do with this one teacher, here would be my criteria for a check-plus poem:

- Voice. This might be the most important and also the hardest to define. You know a strong poetic voice when you see it. Young poets often want to imitate stylistically the writers they admire; I know I did that, and it’s a natural part of learning to write better. A voice that sounds borrowed and hollow and unsure will keep a poem from being great.

- Levels. I think the best poems work on more than one level, which in large part depends on the richness and economy of your language, which I’ll get back to in a minute. A poem should be like (I just came up with this simile, so bear with me) a suitcase that’s completely, absurdly overstuffed. When you first open it, boom. Things should fly all over the room and hit you. It takes you a really long time to organize everything. And all the heaviest stuff is at the bottom.

- Economy and cohesion of language. Meaning, the diction should be as concise as possible. Another simile: a poem should be like an iceberg. Its mass stays mostly under the surface. The language is what you can see, so it needs to be focused, and all the figurative language should be working together.

Those to me are the biggest things. There are so many other little factors too, but those are the overarching themes I’ve experienced. Actually, one more. It’s a two-parter and more of a philosophical point than a technical one: be humble enough to take advice from anyone who is willing to give it, and be confident enough that, if you feel strongly about something, you can disregard that advice when your own instinct trumps it. The better your writing gets, the better your instinct gets, and I think that works both ways.

Because I realize this is all pretty vague-sounding, here is a poem of mine that I would consider a check-plus. And here is a poem I would consider a check, or worse, because it’s rather one-dimensional and has no original voice. Here is a poem we read last semester that has nothing to do with Oberlin creative writing, but I think it’s a beautiful example of all the stuff I mentioned working together.

I should reiterate that all this can’t speak for the Oberlin creative writing department in general because I’m just one student and I’ve only had one professor here. This turned into a much longer answer than I anticipated, but I guess that speaks to my excitement about being able to answer your question! A year ago I couldn’t have said any of this stuff with confidence.