Classifying Your Poetry
In Acumen 50, p.89 David Perman writes that having studied a sample of
recent magazines (280 poems) he found that
- 32%: personal/reflective/elegiac
- 24%: descriptive ("with a bias towards dampness")
- 14%: narrative/historical themes
- 13%: philosophical/reflective/ironic
- 11%: comedy/quirkiness
- 3%: satirical
- 3%: love
These proportions are more to do with what editors choose than what
poets write, and the classifications are arbitrary - he later writes
that if there had been a geriatric section, it would have been overcrowded.
What would the breakdown be if you classified your poems? Mine is roughly
- 33%: Art/Conceptual
- 33%: Life and Death
- 25%: Love
- 10%: Science
Note that as well as helping you discover the kind of poet you are,
classifying your poems has other benefits
- If you're getting rejections maybe it's because you're not writing the sort of
poems that editors want!
- If you want to publish a book it's often a good idea to split it
into sections.
[Quotes]
[Workshops]
[Articles]
[LitRefs]
Updated September 2004
Tim Love