Writing poetry is challenging. It\u2019s as simple as that. The very act of setting the right words in the right order in just the right way is sometimes such an insurmountable endeavor that most simply do not attempt it, and the hard-headed ones keep at it. The number of issues, pitfalls, and conundrums writers face are innumerable. However, among the challenges that I\u2019ve seen with many poets at the beginning of their craft both as a tutor of four years and as an editor of this Spring\u2019s edition of The Dazed Starling<\/em>, one challenge stands out as both glaring and easily fixable: they don\u2019t know what contemporary poetry really looks like or what its tenets are, and as a result, they write in styles that are outdated and destined to flop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, as much as this issue has to do with a lack of familiarity, I don\u2019t blame any young poet doing their best to attempt a Wordsworthian lyrical ballad or a Shakespearian sonnet, no more than I blame myself for attempting something so cringeworthy. I blame the fact that the first time I read a lick of contemporary poetry that made sense, (that wasn\u2019t so blatantly avant-garde or simply some photo on Instagram), wasn\u2019t until I took a creative writing class in my second year of my undergraduate study. I blame the fact that as a supposed major in English Literature, the only frames of reference I had to write a poem were Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Dylan Thomas. All beautiful poets in their own rights and in their own times, but not our time, not in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As much as I\u2019ve written in first person, this issue isn\u2019t unique to me. It is so ubiquitous, in fact, that much of the poetry I\u2019ve read (and much of the poetry I wrote) falls back on some archaism, no matter how contemporary it attempts to be, and some read completely as if they\u2019ve never seen any poetry written after 1850. This is likely because, if my experience serves me right, they simply haven\u2019t read enough, as I certainly did not. Names like Dana Gioia <\/a>or Mary Oliver<\/a> rang no bells, felt obscure, and their poetry even more bewildering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAre these even poems?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Certainly, they are. They just follow different conventions than what we, as readers and aspiring poets, are used to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the fact that this post is a rant about not hearing Gioia\u2019s \u201cPrayer<\/a>\u201d early enough, I am no expert in the \u201ctenets\u201d of contemporary poetry. For one, there are no \u201ctenets\u201d per se; there are only trends, broad tendencies, commonalities in poems written today that we can just barely put our fingers on. If any neophyte poet wishes to grasp these trends, I would recommend Mary Oliver\u2019s A Poetry Handbook<\/em> as a starting point. I return to this book often as a source of inspiration and correction for my own poetry, and as such is indispensable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n