10 Beginner Poet Mistakes I Made So You Don't Have To
A contest judge lists the ten beginner poet mistakes he personally made, from forced rhyme to explaining the ending, and the specific fix for each one, learned the slow way.
Somewhere in a shoebox in my mother's house is a poem called "The Ocean of My Soul." I wrote it at nineteen, submitted it to four magazines, and told at least two people it was probably going to change contemporary poetry. It rhymed "heart" with "apart" twice. In the same stanza. I am telling you this so you understand that everything below is a confession, not a lecture.
Twenty years and several thousand judged poems later, I can see that my early failures were not personal quirks. They were the standard beginner poet mistakes, the same ten I now watch arrive in contest inboxes every single month, wearing slightly different clothes. Every one of them is fixable. Most of them are fixable this week. Here they are, grouped the way the damage actually happens: at the line, in the draft, and inside the poet's head.
Beginner Poet Mistakes at the Line Level
1. Writing in abstractions and calling it depth
My ocean-of-my-soul phase was really an abstraction addiction. Love, pain, darkness, hope, eternity: I thought big words meant big feelings. They mean the opposite. Abstractions are what a reader skims. The fix is mechanical and it works: circle every abstract noun in your draft, then replace at least two thirds of them with a thing you could photograph. Not "grief" but the coat still hanging on the hook in November. Concrete imagery is not decoration. It is the delivery system, and there is no second delivery system.
2. Forcing rhyme until the poem walks backwards
Rhyme is wonderful. Rhyme-first composition is not. You can always spot it: the sentence order flips into strange inversions, the poet chooses "o'er" in the twenty-first century, and one line in every four exists only to arrive at its rhyme word. If rhyme costs you natural word order even once, drop it for that poem, or move the rhymes inside the lines where nobody is grading them.
3. Breaking lines wherever the sentence pauses
For two years I broke every line at a comma, which meant my line breaks were doing nothing a comma was not already doing. A line break is the one tool poetry has that prose does not, and beginners spend it like loose change. Break on the word you want to press. Break to create a small double meaning. Read up on how enjambment carries a sentence over the edge, then rebreak an old poem and watch it wake up.
4. Explaining the poem inside the poem
The beginner's last stanza is almost always a translation of the poem for readers the poet does not trust. I once ended a perfectly decent piece about my grandfather's workbench with the line "and that is when I realized what loss truly means." I had built a room and then nailed a sign to it saying THIS IS A ROOM. Cut the sign. End on the workbench.
Beginner Poet Mistakes in the Draft
5. Submitting the first version while it is still warm
The first draft high is real and it is a liar. I used to finish a poem at midnight and submit it by 12:20. Every poem needs at least one cold read, meaning you have not looked at it for seventy-two hours. What is obvious on Thursday was invisible on Monday. No exceptions, including for the draft that feels like the best thing you have ever written. Especially for that one.
6. Padding the middle because length feels like seriousness
My early poems were twice as long as their content. Somewhere I had absorbed the idea that a real poem fills a page. A poem is finished when the experience is delivered, and some experiences take six lines. If you want proof that compression is a strength and not a shortcut, spend an evening with the haiku tradition and notice how much weather, mortality, and humor fits in seventeen syllables.
7. Keeping the best line even though the poem outgrew it
This is the one that still stings. A poem I loved kept losing contests, and a generous editor finally told me why: my opening line, the line I had built everything around, belonged to a different and worse poem. I defended that line for a year. When I finally cut it, the poem placed within two months. If one line is untouchable in revision, that line is usually the problem. Untouchable means unexamined.
Beginner Poet Mistakes Inside Your Head
8. Reading only the poets you already like
For years my reading diet was three poets deep, so my writing was three poets narrow. You cannot write past what you have read. One new poet a month, chosen from outside your comfort, is the cheapest education in the art. Start anywhere: our Emily Dickinson page is a decent door if your taste runs modern, precisely because she will disobey most of what you believe a poem should do.
9. Treating rejection as a verdict on your talent
My first forty rejections nearly ended me, because I thought each one meant "you are not a poet." A rejection means one reader, on one afternoon, with one page budget, said not this one. That is all it has ever meant. The poets who make it are rarely the most gifted ones I have judged. They are the ones still submitting in year five.
10. Writing for an imaginary judge instead of a real reader
Eventually I learned the rules well enough to commit the most advanced beginner mistake: writing poems designed to be approved rather than felt. Clean, competent, correctly enjambed, and dead. A judge can feel the difference between a poem that needed to exist and a poem that wanted to win. Write the first kind. The second kind never does win anyway.
Your first hundred poems are tuition. Pay them gladly and keep the receipts.
One Worked Example: The Fix in Action
Here is a line of my own nineteen-year-old writing, reconstructed from memory and shame:
My heart was drowning in an endless sea of sorrow.
Mistakes one, two, and six in a single sentence: abstraction, cliche, and padding. Here is the same emotional payload rebuilt with the rules above:
I salted the walk twice that winter.
Nobody was coming.
Eleven words. No heart, no sea, no sorrow, and any reader who has been left alone in a house knows exactly what it says. That transformation is not talent. It is a checklist, applied.
The Tonight Checklist
Pull out one old poem and run this sequence before bed. It takes thirty minutes and it is the compressed version of my expensive decade:
- Circle every abstract noun. Replace two thirds with photographable things.
- Read it aloud. Anywhere the word order sounds inverted for rhyme, unrhyme it.
- Rebreak three lines so the break lands on a pressure word, not a comma.
- Delete the last two lines. Read it again. In my judging experience, the poem improves about half the time, which is a coin flip worth taking.
- Find your favorite line and ask whether the poem needs it or whether you do.
- If the poem survives all five steps, it is ready for a cold read in three days.
- If it survives the cold read, it is ready for other eyes.
Why I Am Glad I Made All Ten
Here is the part the listicle format hides: I do not actually wish someone had handed me this list at nineteen, because I would not have believed a word of it. I had to defend my untouchable line for a year to learn what untouchable means. The list does not replace the mistakes. It shortens them, from a decade to maybe eighteen months, and eighteen months is a gift worth taking.
The other thing that shortens the road is honest scoring, which is the reason I ended up on the judging side at all. The first time a contest showed me numbers instead of a form rejection, I could finally see that my structure was fine and my language was the leak. That kind of mirror is rare, and it is the thing I would hand my nineteen-year-old self before any advice. Writory's monthly contest gives every entrant that mirror, a five-part score across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, whether or not you place. If you want to find out which of the ten mistakes is actually costing you, send in the poem you believe in most and let the breakdown tell you the truth.
Then go write poem one hundred and one. That is the one the tuition was for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.