Plain Language Poetry: The Hardest Trick in the Book
Ornate poems impress workshops; plain poems get remembered. A contest judge explains why simple language is the most difficult mode in poetry, and how to earn it in your own drafts.
Here is a confession from the scoring table: when I open an entry and the first line contains the word gossamer, my hopes drop. When the first line says something like my mother kept the good scissors in a drawer we were not allowed to open, I sit up. Plain language poetry, the mode where every word could be said across a kitchen table, is the mode most beginners look down on and most judges quietly rank highest. It is also, and this is the part nobody warns you about, the hardest way to write.
Ornament can hide a weak poem the way frosting hides a dry cake. Plainness hides nothing. Write plainly and every flaw stands in daylight: the soft verb, the fake feeling, the line that exists to sound like a line. Which is exactly why plainness, done well, produces the poems people carry around for decades.
Why Plain Language Poetry Outlasts Ornate Poetry
Think about the lines civilians actually remember, the ones non-poets quote at funerals and weddings. Almost none of them are lexically fancy. They are plain statements set at exactly the right angle. William Carlos Williams built a career on this bet. His most famous poem, from 1923 and long in the public domain, opens:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
Sixteen words in the whole poem, none longer than two syllables, and a century later we are still arguing about it. That is not an accident of fame. Plain words have the largest surface area of shared experience: everyone owns drawer, scissors, rain, so the reader's own life rushes in to fill them. Rare words are private property; common words are commons. The Williams library page is a good place to watch this economy at work across a whole career.
There is also a trust mechanism. Ornate language announces that the poet is performing, and audiences keep a polite distance from performances. Plain language reads as testimony, and we lean toward testimony. The plainer the sentence, the more the reader assumes it is true, which is a power you should use with clean hands.
Fancy words tell the reader what you studied. Plain words tell the reader what you survived.
The Difference Between Plain and Flat
Now the necessary distinction, because every workshop contains someone who heard "write plainly" and delivered a grocery list. Plain is not flat. Flat language is plain words in dead arrangements: predictable syntax, no pressure, no selection. Plain style is plain words under enormous selection pressure, where the ordinary word sits in an extraordinary position.
Three things separate them:
- Selection. The plain stylist considered gossamer and rejected it. Flatness never considered anything. You can feel the difference on the page; rejected alternatives leave a kind of heat.
- Placement. In plain style, the line break and the sentence do the work the vocabulary refuses to do. A plain sentence broken against its grain becomes strange again. This is why plain poets tend to be obsessive about line breaks: the break is their entire percussion section.
- Withholding. Plain poems are quiet about exactly one thing, the thing the whole poem circles. Flat poems are quiet about nothing in particular. Plainness is a held breath; flatness is no breath at all.
The Poem That Beat My Favorite
Two contests ago I had a favorite going into the final scoring: a gorgeous, cathedral-ceiling piece about migration, dense with sound, the kind of poem you underline. It lost, on my own scorecard, to a fourteen-line poem about a man washing his late wife's coffee mug and putting it back in the cupboard, wrong side out, the way she never did. The whole poem had maybe one word of three syllables.
I fought my own verdict for an evening. The ornate poem was more impressive. But impressive is a first-reading quality, and I had read both poems five times by then. The plain poem got better on every pass because there was nothing between me and the man at the sink. The ornate poem got slightly worse, because I started to see the machinery. On the fifth reading, the mug turned wrong side out was unbearable. That is what plainness buys: it survives rereading, and contests, like anthologies and like memory, are rereading machines. Ask yourself which quality you are writing for, the first impression or the fifth, because the two are built with different tools, and only one of them lasts.
A Before and After Edit
Both versions are mine. Subject: a son learning his father is losing his sight.
Before:
Darkness encroaches on my father's vision,
a slow eclipse devouring his horizons,
and I am rendered helpless, a mere witness
to the twilight of his luminous world.
After:
My father asks me to read him the mail.
He holds each envelope up to the lamp
first, like he's checking. Bills, I tell him. Bills.
He nods and lets me have the letter opener.
The before version is all announced emotion: encroaches, eclipse, helpless, twilight. It tells you it is a poem in every clause. The after version never mentions blindness, darkness, or feelings. It gives you a man holding envelopes to a lamp like he's checking, still performing sight for his own dignity, and a son answering Bills twice because there is nothing else safe to say. The surrender of the letter opener is the entire tragedy, handed over in four plain words. Every reader I have shown these two stanzas prefers the second, and most cannot immediately say why. The why is that plainness left them room to do the feeling themselves.
The Strip-Down Method: Five Passes
Here is the revision sequence I recommend for earning plainness. One draft, five passes, one evening.
- The Latin pass. Circle every word of three or more syllables. For each, ask if a shorter Anglo-Saxon word exists: attempt becomes try, illuminate becomes light. Keep the long word only when it earns its length.
- The kitchen-table pass. Read the poem aloud imagining a specific person you love who does not read poetry. Mark every phrase you would be embarrassed to say to their face. Those phrases are performances. Rewrite them as speech.
- The feeling-word purge. Delete grief, love, longing, sorrow, joy and their cousins. Replace each with the object or action that was present when the feeling happened. The mug. The letter opener. The envelope held to the lamp.
- The break audit. With the vocabulary now plain, your line breaks carry the music. Break at least two sentences in places that create a small double meaning or a held beat. This is where plain style stops being prose.
- The one-strange-thing rule. Allow yourself exactly one unusual word or one odd image in the finished poem. One. Set against a plain field, it will detonate. Set among ten others, it would be wallpaper.
The Case Against, Answered
The standard objection: plainness is a style, not a virtue, and pushed as dogma it flattens the art. Half true. Rich, maximal poetry has given us permanent glories, and a judge who penalizes lushness on principle is a bad judge. My claim is narrower. Plainness is the mode with the worst reputation among beginners relative to its actual power, and the mode most likely to expose whether you have anything to say. Learn it even if you leave it. The poet who can write plainly and chooses ornament is decorating a house with a foundation. The poet who cannot write plainly is decorating a tent.
And if you suspect your current draft is hiding behind its vocabulary, there is a fast way to find out: strip it with the five passes and put it in front of strangers. Writory's monthly contest gives every single entrant a score breakdown across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, so you can submit the plain version and see the numbers instead of guessing. Poets from over fifty countries enter each month, and the plain poems, I promise you, hold their own against the cathedrals.
Say the True Sentence
Somewhere in your notebook is a sentence you wrote quickly, without trying, that is better than everything you polished around it. Plain style is the discipline of writing toward that sentence on purpose: scissors in the drawer, mug in the cupboard, bills read out loud under a lamp. The words are free. Everyone owns them. What you pay instead is the full price of being seen without costume, and the poems that pay it are the ones we do not forget.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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