Why would I admit to writing bad poetry? It’s a great question, and honestly one of the most reassuring ones you can ask a poet, because it reminds us that even the giants wrote clunkers. Writing bad poems is not just normal for great poets, it is necessary. Every major poet has published work that feels awkward, forced, sentimental, incoherent, or simply beneath their usual standard, and looking at these failures helps demystify the idea of genius. Many weak poems come from early apprenticeship, before a poet has discovered their true voice. Emily Dickinson’s juvenilia includes sentimental, moralizing verses that bear little resemblance to the compressed brilliance she later achieved, while Sylvia Plath’s early college poems are often stiff, formally correct, and overly indebted to poets she admired rather than expressive of her own sensibility. T. S. Eliot wrote Victorian-sounding pieces before “Prufrock” that now read like uneasy rehearsals for the poet he would become. I choose to publish my childhood poetry to show my earliest works in Lost in the Lost and Found. I expect it to be reviewed exactly as it was, poems from a child, or as the critics often say, juvenilia.

Other weak poems arise from occasion rather than inspiration. Even brilliant poets are sometimes inclined to write for weddings, funerals, political moments, or patrons, and these poems can feel ceremonial, emotionally flat, or dutiful rather than alive. W. H. Auden famously despised some of his own occasional poems and tried to suppress them later in life, openly acknowledging that they failed to live up to his standards. I call this poetry Market poetry, and have explored and forced myself to write on these common themes as well. I often find these poems have less passion, serving a preordained purpose rather than being an individual voice.

Experimentation is another major source of so called bad poems, because innovation inevitably produces misfires. Gerard Manley Hopkins pushed his sprung rhythm so far in some late poems that many readers find them nearly unreadable, while Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic collage techniques sometimes collapse into incoherence rather than illumination. Even E. E. Cummings, whose visual daring transformed modern poetry, occasionally produced typographical experiments that critics see as gimmicky exercises rather than meaningful poems. Since my poems are more likely to be experimental and often repetitive in the experiment, I expect critics to say these same things about much of my work.

Some bad poems come from moments when poets become overly didactic or preachy. William Wordsworth’s later work often slips into moral lecturing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical poems can read like prose essays awkwardly broken into lines. I choose this route with my News poetry, choosing to write based on political headlines, looking for inspiration but instead realizing these historical lines fell flat and reads like historical facts and not poetry.

There is also the quieter, less comfortable truth that some poets decline late in life. Although W. B. Yeats produced extraordinary late poems, his very last work sometimes drifts into rambling self-mythology, while Longfellow’s late poems are often criticized as predictable and overly sentimental. I have used experimental challenges to try to avoid this, which in and of itself can make poetry unreadable.

Finally, some poems are “bad” by design, written as light verse or nonsense with no ambition toward depth. Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems are intentionally flimsy, and Dorothy Parker’s witty quips prioritize punchlines over resonance. I myself have had fun with this. I hope critics might be kind in my desire to write it all, good and bad, with my personal voice coming out in poems that I find to be slivers of my soul. Even then, I have taken these and reworked them into different poems to the point that they barely exist. I do not simply write poetry, I intentionally exhaust it.

What makes this topic matter is that it is liberating. If Dickinson, Plath, Eliot, Yeats, Auden, and Wordsworth and admitting myself, wrote weak poems, then writing a bad poem is not evidence of failure but proof that one is doing the work. These poems often reveal what a poet was trying to learn, what they feared, and what they had not yet mastered. They are the compost from which masterpieces grow, and in that sense, bad poems are not an embarrassment to literary history but one of its most honest records.