Victoria Blake exacts from her keyboard,

Most recently, I posted my attempt at imitating the late Blake’s style of poetry. As I mentioned in the post, that is all very well and fine as an exercise, but is not an end in itself.

Here, I want to propound a different style of poetry–the style that I am working toward as an end in itself. I would like to call it the style of the current Blake, but that is probably too arrogant, not to say untrue. I will simply call it exact poetry.

In exact poetry, the poet simply writes down exactly what he means.
Exact poems do not use stock phrases — snow white arms, sea blue skies, and so on and so forth. Because really. Who really has snow white arms? And would that even be attractive? And the sea is a much deeper greener blue than a sky would ever be, except maybe before a tornado.
Exact poems don’t stray away from metaphor, however, nor do they become tautological. Instead, they aim to find more precise or exact metaphors. For example, if something hurts like those dentist drills, say so. Don’t try to find some more naturalistic or old-timey metaphor. Just say it hurts like a dentist drill.
To go back to those formerly snow white arms, they’re probably more of the color of really peachy peach yogurt. The only way I can think of to describe a sky right now is one of those nice new crayola crayons, probably called something ridiculous like Robin’s Egg Blue.

The more familiar the metaphor, the more effective it will be. Consider trying to convey the idea of painful cold. Everyone–most everyone, anyway–has had the experience of a dentist blowing cold air on a tender tooth. Because of this, a metaphor involving cold air on a tooth will be much more effective than, say, a metaphor involving whipping winds in northern Siberia. While the latter would actually be worse to endure, it is inaccessible. Few people, upon reading that, will get an actual sensory perception of cold.
Write down. Don’t assume your audience is some high-minded group of classicists who grew up on the extended metaphors of Homer. Write something that one of those homeless people who hang around bus stops and ask you for change would understand.

In essence, the language of exact poetry is simple, straightforward, and everyday. The ideas, of course, can still be as weird as all get out. But they still have to be expressed and communicated as clearly as if they were something mundane like teethbrushing.

To give credit where credit is due, a lot of my ideas about and preferences among metaphors came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom I believe is the best writer ever. He didn’t write poetry, though, as far as I know.