Personally, I like poems that have a good sound to them. The Garden of Proserpine is an excellent example: the rhyme scheme is just amazing. And I've yet to read a poem that excited me as much on a first read through as Poe's The Bells did.

What do you like best in a poem?

I also like poems that people can relate to and place themselves 'as the author'

The emotions are important, but the way in which they are portrayed, the language; that's what is most important

It's the imagery that really can pull a piece together.

Some people regard my views as very unrealistic, and tell me that I should open my mind up a little bit. But, I think it's just as closeminded to tell me that I should ignore all rule, and form in my poetry. That's just not creative to me. If I wanted to say things in that way, I'd write a paragraph, not a stanza.

Emotion is important. Intent is important. Sometimes, allusion can be important too. Mythology and other poem referenced can be very affecting on the reader, so I try to use allusions as often as possible.

*I Shot Mel Anne Kholi

Besides the fact that this commonly used phrase is grammatically incorrect, where's the fun in reading things that fit nicely within your realm of experience? By reading a poem to which you CAN'T relate, you force your mind to stretch in order to find meaning, and are thusly a better poet for having read it.

In my opinion, "I like to read things that I can relate to" translates into, "I don't like to have to think about a poem".

Finding a poem that you can relate you means different things to different people. You might find comfort in the poem because you're going through the same thing at the time. All different poems can relate to different people, and the can mean different things to those people.

Glad for your input though.

However, in every case (and I mean EVERY case) in which the aforementioned phrase is used, the user has been a person who is only interested in reading literature written by or about people from their social dynamic. The most common example is the group of airheads found in every English class who say, "I liked this book because it was like, about teenagers and stuff, and I'm a teenager, so you know, I could like, relate to it."

I must admit that the phrase "that I can relate to" might have been misdefined on my part because of its frequent association with people I don't like. Perhaps a better choice of words would be, "that directly relates to me".

In that sense, I find that I gain more understanding about my life from reading about people whose experiences are diametrically opposite from mine. I would rather read about a Holocaust survivor or a Civil War hero or a Chinese farmer than about an average teenager going through things that I have already been through. It's just more fun that way.

I like situations I can't relate to (for example, 99.999% of Fantasy and Science Fiction), but I still like to know how the character is feeling. Yes, the "I" or "You" in a poem is still a character, in case that needed clarifying.

In poetry, this basically means I like poems about the impossible or the unlikely: Immortality (I have to think about what it must be like to live forever, but I know what it feels like to be bored, or lonely, or relieved), death/dying (I know I'll do it eventually, but I'm not sure what it's like just yet), the return of someone who's been away for a long time.

~Bitter Irony

I'm fixing simple grammar errors.

Please, please, please x1,000, double check your posts! Possesives, conjunctions, capitalizing of the letter I...it's beyond belief the number of basic English rules have been thrown out the window on these forums. Mine, at least, will have no such issues! (Cue haughty music in background and sudden change in voice).

:-) Just a gentle warning. Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, but I am serious about grammar errors. It's one of my many eccentricities. Work with it.

~Bitter Irony

I have at least one favorite poem. I know this because I could recite it by heart at any given time. Oddly enough, it's not even short. And no, it's not one of my own. Please! I'm not *that* conceited.

I snicker wholeheartedly at the irony of the last post. Well done, Tofujunky. But furthermore, I think it exemplifies one of the problems with using esoteric words in poetry. Ahem, I shall explain.

I don't mind having to look up words in order to understand peice of prose; In fact, I like it. I pick up my dictionary, I laugh at the joke, and I learn a new word because of it. With poetry, it's different. Having to look up a word irrecoverably disrupts the flow of the piece. Even having to stop and think about a word that I know but rarely hear, while it doesn't ruin the poem, creates a mental "catch" in the rhythm. It's like running to a steady rhythm and tripping over a rock.

I always use Robert Frost's Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening to exemplify what good poetry is. The rhyme and meter is painstakingly done, and even though the poem is extremely depressing to the point of suicidal there isn't any mention of the "oh boohoo the world revolves around me and I want to cut myself" crap.

I don't understand poems that are segmented into different parts, or poems that try to depict a scene as a story would. Very complex words & phrases are also things I look for in a poem.

And this might be going back a bit, but about relatablity... There is a distinct difference between relatable poems and poems people relate to. A writer should make the emotions behind a poem relatable for the readers, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be about the exact same thing that happened to the readers just last week for them to understand where the poem is coming from. Fear and pain and love are universal, but people writing about being afraid their significant other won't like their new shoes that pinch their toes is more or less writing for a select audiences.

I think I have an odd sense of what is relatable since I often write about things I can't relate with. I know I know, write what you know and all that conventional wisdom, but I am an observer and a lot of what I write is taken from watching real people and trying to create something that lets me explore what the might be feeling. I think this watcher's mentality is why I generally write poems in third person and use heavy imagery, I am trying to capture someone else's emotions.

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