‘Do you ever run out of ideas’? a relative asked me recently. 

I answered honestly: ‘No’.

I rarely suffer from writer’s block, my problem is more usually whether a piece of writing is any good, or not. Often, I can’t be sure. 

However, I do know of various methods, which you can adopt to find out. 

Read the thing to someone else. 

Probably not your Mum, an old friend, or your partner because they may attempt to be kind. And not to a sibling, for the opposite reason. 

For a more balanced critical appraisal, your best bet is often another poet, either in a writing group, or someone you know personally well enough to share a draft with, but who won’t hold-back on critical suggestions. (Unless, of course, they nurture a hidden, seething rivalry with you and then, anything could happen: “Yeah it’s brilliant, you should pay to enter it into that international competition that costs a bargain £18.50 to enter”).

Email it, message it. They’ll be delighted to read and critique your latest masterpiece. Honest. Ok, they may not reply as quickly as you’d like, but a poetic mate, who doesn’t quite tend towards the same typical style or subject matter as you, is probably a good place to start if you’re looking for constructive criticism. 

Once they’ve told you the title is shit, you should cut the middle out, reverse the beginning and the end and lose the ninth line because it’s too showy and poety, you might have something. 

And then, you’re right back where you started, on your own.

Even a gift from the muse tends to need a little help

On rare occasions, a poem has arrived in my head seemingly out of nowhere and on transcribing it, I’ve been so pleased with it/myself that in an unfortunate burst of enthusiasm, have despatched it off to the nearest open submissions window and started imagining seeing it published in several months’ time. 

Mostly, when I have succumbed to this impulse, I have been wrong.

The poem is not ready. 

Like an egg, you need to brood on a poem for a while, until it’s ready to hatch, and even then, your work isn’t done; you have to allow a bit more time for it to take flight.

Not always though. One recent acceptance I had, was for the poem I least expected to be liked by the journal in question. This was because I’d included it as a bit of a makeweight. 

The call-out was for a themed issue. I had a couple of poems, I’d made earlier – Blue Peter stylee, that were well-shaped and suitable and another in note form, which I proceeded to polish into what I believed was a potential banger. I needed a fourth to complete the requisite submission number. I knocked a short number out, in an impatient fit of ‘I just need to submit something right now’ and added it to the others to send out that day. 

And that unfussed over creature, was the poem the editor was pleased to accept. Resulting in me experiencing that strange sensation some of you may be familiar with, where you are at once very pleased to have achieved an acceptance, but a little irked that it wasn’t the pet poem in your submission, which was chosen. 

Try it out on a poor, unsuspecting editor

Sending out and receiving back, can be another method of testing a poem’s quality. This has the additional benefit of forcing you to leave the poem(s) concerned alone for a while.

When the recalcitrant poem returns, you may retain faith in it and decide that just because Editor A didn’t click with it, Editor B might do. And off it goes again, accompanied by a different mix of companion poems. 

Alternatively, you may get such a poem back, re-read it and suffer the cold feeling of your pulse slowing and the blood draining from your head as you castigate previous you of three months ago: ‘What was I thinking, it’s bad. There’s a word repeated in the third stanza. A clunky internal rhyme, an ending that’s far too neat and pleased with itself and I’m not sure what I was even on about…”

Given the amount of rejections the average poet receives (You’d know all about that Gilbert – boom boom), this is not an infrequent experience.

Take it apart and put it back together again

That said, I rarely give up entirely on a poem – the odd one or two get binned, or banished to the purgatory of this blog – there, at the very least a web crawler will read it. 

Most returned poems get dropped back into the ‘work in progress’ folder and are eventually Frankensteined into another form. Maybe the head and the feet retain something of the earlier character, or a pleasing line or phrase survives the drastic surgery, long enough to go staggering back into the world. Do such poetic revenants count as the same poem? Discuss…

Whether or not they qualify as quite the same poem, those in which I maintain an obstinate belief, do tend to make it into the public realm, eventually.

For example, another acceptance I was pleased to have lately, involved just such a stubborn so-and-so of a poem. A poem I’ve been trying out on poor innocent editors for over three years. Finally, we must be on at least Editor Q by now, one beautiful person agreed with me and accepted it. 

What does this tell us? Tell me? 

Well, I/You will never be the most objective judges at divining whether a specific poem of your own is any good or not.

I can assure you though that persistence is a far more reliable friend than that flaky bastard inspiration. 

*There is no easy answer.