Your Old Poems Are Embarrassing. Good. Read Them Anyway
Cringing at your old poems is evidence that your taste grew. A contest judge explains the mechanics of the cringe and shares a six-step salvage method for mining early work without shame.
Two winters ago I found my 2011 notebook behind a radiator, swollen with damp, and read a poem in which I rhymed "fire" with "desire" and then, incredibly, with "higher." I read it standing up, the way you read bad news. Here is what I want you to understand before anything else: if you find your old poems embarrassing, you are holding proof of growth, not proof of failure. The cringe is a measurement. It records the exact distance between the writer you were and the reader you have become, and most people misread that measurement as shame. Judges do not have this luxury of illusion. I have scored thousands of poems, and I can tell you the writers who improve fastest are the ones who reread their embarrassing work on purpose, with a pencil, like an editor visiting a younger client.
The Cringe Is Data, Not a Verdict
Think about what has to be true for an old poem to make you wince. You must now perceive flaws you could not perceive when you wrote it. The clumsy inversion, the moon doing symbolic labor it never agreed to, the last stanza that explains the poem like a museum placard: none of that was visible to you at the time. You wrote the best poem you could see. What changed is your seeing.
So the wince is your critical faculty firing at material your younger self left behind. That is the same faculty you need for revising current work. An old notebook is, in effect, a free training gym where the weights are poems you no longer have to protect.
Cringe is the sound of your standards arriving after your poems did.
The only genuinely bad response is the common one: slam the notebook shut, feel sick for an hour, and quietly conclude you were never any good. That conclusion is backwards. The person who wrote those lines could not have detected these problems. You just did, in seconds, for free.
Why Old Poems Feel Embarrassing: Taste Outruns Skill
The mechanics are simple and nobody explains them. Your taste improves through reading, and reading is fast. Your skill improves through writing, and writing is slow. So taste runs years ahead of skill for most of a writing life, and every time you look backward across that gap, you cringe. The gap never fully closes, by the way. I know poets with major prizes who cannot read their first book aloud. Thomas Hardy kept revising poems decades after publication. The discomfort you feel at your 2016 notebook is the same species of discomfort, just earlier in the sequence.
This also means the absence of cringe is the actual warning sign. If your poems from five years ago look perfectly fine to you, either you were a prodigy or, far more likely, your taste has stopped moving. I would rather a poet come to me mortified than satisfied. Mortified means the instrument still works.
What I Found in My Own Juvenilia
Back to the radiator notebook. After the fire and desire episode, I made myself read all sixty pages with a pencil, and the experience rearranged my opinion of my younger self. Yes, the poems were overwrought. Yes, every third poem addressed an unnamed "you" with the intensity of a restraining order. But on page forty-one, inside a terrible poem about autumn, sat this line: "the trees give up their money all at once." I had no idea what to do with it in 2011. I knew exactly what to do with it now. It became the opening of a poem about my grandfather's bankruptcy, a poem that has done well for me since.
That is the real reason to reread embarrassing work. Your younger self had worse technique but, often, braver instincts. Beginners reach for enormous subjects, wild metaphors, and emotional risks that experienced writers have been trained out of. The notebook holds their nerve. You hold the craft. The collaboration between the two of you is where the good poems live.
The Salvage Read: A Six-Step Method
Do not reread old work casually, in bed, at your most tender. Do it as a procedure. Here is the one I use and assign:
- Wait for a neutral day. Not after a rejection, not after a triumph. You want the editor brain, not the wounded one.
- Read the whole notebook once without a pen. Let the cringe spend itself. It burns off faster than you expect, usually within ten pages.
- Second pass: underline lines, never whole poems. You are prospecting for phrases, images, and titles. A ninety-word failure containing one alive line is a successful excavation.
- Copy every underlined fragment into a single harvest file. Out of context, stripped of the poem that embarrassed you, the fragments become raw material with no history.
- Name the repeat offenses. Write down, in one sentence each, the three habits that made you wince most. Mine were explaining endings, decorative adjectives, and rhyme-driven word choice. You will meet these habits again in your current drafts, wearing better clothes.
- Rescue one poem, delete none. Pick the single poem with the strongest pulse and revise it with everything you now know. Leave the rest intact. They are the record.
A Rescue in Action
To show what step six looks like, here is an invented but representative before, the kind of stanza most of us wrote at seventeen:
My heart is a shattered mirror of pain,
reflecting the darkness of your cruel lies,
and I will never be whole again,
alone forever under empty skies.
The abstractions are stacked four deep and the rhyme is driving the car. But the mirror is worth keeping. Watch:
The hallway mirror kept your habit of looking past me.
I took it down. The wall wears a pale rectangle now,
cleaner than anything else in the house.
Same wound, same mirror, no announcement of pain anywhere. The pale rectangle carries all of it. Notice the revision's real move was cutting every abstract noun and letting one object testify instead. If abstraction is your own repeat offense, the glossary page on concrete imagery is the fastest cure I know, and studying how compressed forms force the issue helps too; even a failed attempt at a sonnet will teach you what every word costs.
What to Keep, What to Compost
After a few salvage reads you develop a sorting instinct. Until then, use this:
- Keep: any image you can still see with your eyes closed, any line with a rhythm you did not plan, any title better than its poem, any subject you flinched away from and never returned to.
- Compost: named emotions, weather used as mood lighting, second-person accusations, endings that explain, anything that exists to serve a rhyme.
- Flag for later: poems that fail identically. Three bad poems about your father are not three failures. They are one unwritten poem knocking.
Composting is not deleting. Everything stays in the notebook. The compost designation just means you stop mining that vein and stop feeling guilty about it. And ten years on, the composted poems become something better than material anyway: a dated record of who you were, which is worth owning even when the lines are not.
Write Something Worth Cringing At in 2036
Here is the ending I actually believe, and it is not "be kind to your younger self," although you should. It is this: the cringe is coming for your current work too. The poem you are proudest of right now, the one you would submit tonight, will embarrass some future version of you, and that is the best possible news, because it means the future version exists. The alternative is writing that never embarrasses you because you never improved enough to see through it.
So take the risks that generate future cringe. Send the ambitious poem out while you still love it; poems do their work in the world at the level of craft you have today, not the level you will have someday. Some of the pieces featured among our past winners were, their authors later admitted, revised within an inch of their lives from truly rough notebook drafts, and if you want unsentimental feedback on where a current poem actually stands, the monthly cycle at Writory returns a five-part score breakdown to every single entrant, not just the winners. Your 2036 self will reread this year's poems, wince at a few lines, and then, if you have done this right, underline one and carry it forward. Leave them something worth stealing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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