My favourite definition of poetry is Robert Frost’s: “Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen”, and it is freshness most of all that I look for when I come across new poems - a freshness of angle, a making new, an element of surprise.

The opposite to all this, of course, is the cliched or hackneyed approach. As Frost said, “An idea has to be a little new to be at all true and if you say a thing three times it ceases to be so.” Applying this yardstick to the poems I read, so many of them were ruled out by the tactics they adopted.

Here are some of those tactics: a reliance on bald abstractions or large generalisations; cliches (and horror cliches); archaic language and inversion; liberal doses of teenage existential angst; simplistic and over-insistent repetitions; messages too spelt out - telling, rather than showing; rhyme dictating what word is used, whether it makes sense there or not; a flatness of expression, with no rhythm or cadence noticeable. It is not enough to encourage children to write, they must also learn some basic points of technique. The Poets in Schools scheme is there to help make this possible. And so many of the poems in my big shortlist would have benefited from drafting.

Sometimes it was only a simple matter of lines that suddenly didn’t make sense, or inconsistency of tenses. Having said all this, I found much that encouraged me, and I was reminded that there are different ways for a poem to be effective. Another famous American, Robert Lowell, spoke of “pictures that please or thrill for themselves, and phrases that ring for their music or carry some buried suggestion”. The poems that will appear this term have their fill of pictures that please or phrases that ring. And they have the odd surprise.

For example, this week’s poem by Bernard Clark. The idea of a poem being liquid is a very surprising one, and one that is well handled. I loved the way the liquidity was so physically imagined, and the care with which the liquid poem was put down. The repetitions at the start of the lines work here, and the mopping up of the lost words, and the squeezing in of them (with its dual connotations of squeezing into a tight space, as well as squeezing the water out of a mop) is a lovely touch.

Liquid Writing

Carefully I put my poem down

Careful not to splash it everywhere

Careful not to lose the stillness

It possesses.

I’m gentle so as not to create waves

I’m gentle so as not to get it jumbled

I’m gentle so as not to made a mess

All over the area I place it.

I mop up the lost words

I mop them up and ease them in with the rest

By Bernard Clark, age 13, who receives Matthew Sweeney’s The Flying Spring Onion. Submitted by Angela Rayner of Trinity Catholic High School, Woodford Green, Essex, who receives the Poetry Society’s teachers’ newsletter, a quarterly bulletin which includes features on innovative approaches to poetry in the classroom as well as news on the latest resources, events and issues. For Poetry Society events, ring 071 240 4810. The Poets in Schools scheme is run by the Poetry Society and sponsored by W H Smith.