Smoke Tests

· 11 min read

I struggled with math for a long time. It was boring. I tolerated it until college, where my degree programs required math up through differential equations.

I started over from basic Algebra my first semester, Trigonometry the second, and then a Pre-Calc class the next summer changed everything. A summer class meant real face time with the professor, and by the end of the first week I was in Professor Foster’s office hours. This was the first serious one-on-one time I’d ever spent with someone who knew what they were doing with math.

Instead of lecturing, she just sat with me while I re-worked problems I had done wrong. Once I fixed them, she showed me other problems where one mistake had been made and I needed to find what it was. She had a huge archive of wrong answers she’d collected, and we kept going through them. It wasn’t enough to rework the problem and give the answer; she wanted to know specifically where the answer had gone off the rails.

At some point this felt less like math and more like detective work. I started to know where to double-check things because I had seen so many answers fail in particular ways. I got an A. Differential equations turned out to be… fun? I began keeping taxonomies of my own failures.

The thing about math is that higher-level concepts are just combinations of lower-level concepts. That’s what made Professor Foster’s idea possible: a wrong answer doesn’t fail everywhere at once. It fails at a joint. If you can find the joint, you can name the failure, and if you can name it, you can watch for it.

Poetry decomposes the same way. A sonnet is not a new thing; it is a particular arrangement of meter, rhyme, and turn. A haiku is not a new thing; it is a particular arrangement of image, cut, and season. The arrangement is the poem. If we can analyze the joints in a poem and test them we can talk about failures more concretely than “this didn’t work for me”.

So if failure is the better teacher, the question becomes: where do you find an archive of wrong answers big enough to learn from?

Enter Reddit haiku.

People I talk to about Reddit poetry often say something like “Oh, you like bad poetry,” in the same way a person might like bad 80’s action movies ironically. I fundamentally reject the idea that it is bad. As I get further into this and talk about “failures,” I do not mean the poem has actually failed to become a poem. A failure, for our purposes, is a poem whose form is not doing any work.

I think we often stick to the canon of what we consider “good” poetry. When we think of short poems we might look at William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, maybe some W.S. Merwin or Kay Ryan. The problem is, though, you are looking at poems that have been solved. They are beautiful and perfect. When you sit down to write one yourself, it’s ugly and weird, and you give up.

I believe, just as I learned from Professor Foster, there is a tremendous amount to learn from “failures.” I further believe Reddit haiku specifically is a better training ground than it sounds.

Here’s why:

  • The form is small enough that failures are legible. A novel fails diffusely; a haiku fails in a few inspectable places.
  • They fail in predictable ways, which can be identified and diagnosed quickly. Compare this to a technically accomplished failure, which might look like a competent surface surrounding a hollow center. That is harder to diagnose.
  • They usually fail toward sentimentality. Unearned emotion and gestures toward profundity are harder to identify in longer forms and, in my opinion, they are the hardest to correct once you’ve metabolized them. They will be immediately apparent in a haiku; they have nowhere to hide.

Here’s the taxonomy. The specimens below are composites with details swapped so they belong to no one, but each failure is a real one, seen over and over.

The Taxonomy

First, a method.

Sentence Integrity Check

Description: The Sentence Integrity Check is the diagnostic procedure, while Just a Sentence (below) is one result it can expose.

Test: Replace the line breaks with punctuation and see what you actually have. De-lineating a poem might reveal:

  • A banal but coherent sentence → Just a Sentence.
  • A grammatically mangled sentence created solely by line breaks → concealed syntactic weakness.
  • Several unrelated fragments → often Line Jam.
  • A sentence whose ending merely explains its beginning → often Weak/Profound L3.

Just a Sentence (prose with Enter-key damage)

The poem is ordinary prose distributed across three lines.

the coffee grows cold
as I sit here waiting for
your car to pull in

Test: Run the Sentence Integrity Check — replace the line breaks with punctuation.

“The coffee grows cold as I sit here waiting for your car to pull in.”

That’s it. That’s the whole poem. A perfectly fine sentence, but the lineation contributed nothing — no cut, no delay, no pressure. The Return key did the work that images or syntax should have done. Enter-key damage.

Note: this is not simply “the syntax is grammatical.” The failure is that the poem’s entire poetic mechanism consists of having pressed Return twice.

Why This Exists: A fear of departing from ordinary declarative sense.

Line Jam (three random things thrown together)

Three images or thoughts are placed beside one another without a relationship.

winter solstice
the smell of gasoline
a blue door

Test: Substitute one of the images. Swap the gasoline for woodsmoke, or a dead fish. Does anything change? No. The images are hanging out with each other on a bench, not talking.

Adjacency isn’t juxtaposition.

Why This Exists: Desire for instant mystery.

Weak L3 (“The poem pees its pants and leaves”)

Lines one and two establish some possibility, but line three runs out of energy and escapes into:

  • a generic abstraction
  • a moral
  • a slogan
  • a sentimental summary
  • a shrug
  • a fortune-cookie pronouncement

hospital window
the vending machine hums
hope endures

Test: Remove L3 and re-read. If the poem still completes itself, L3 was doing your feeling for you.

In this example, L1 and L2 are doing fine, concrete work. Then L3 saunters in and tells you what to feel. “Hope endures” is a bumper sticker stapled to a scene.

Why This Exists: Fear that the reader won’t know what to feel.

Profound L3 (LIFE, AMIRITE??)

L1 and L2 establish some possibility, but L3 introduces extreme voltage that collapses the meaning into a neutron star. Basically any time the word “Behold” appears anywhere.

morning dew
on the spider’s web
behold, the infinite

Test: pull L3 out and drop it under any other two lines, reading only for energy — not coherence.

eating a sandwich
behold, the infinite

It still explodes.

(A side effect: Profound L3 transplants are often a good source of beautiful generative poem seeds.)

Why This Exists: Desire to certify significance.

Perfumed Language Anywhere

The poem imports syntax from Shakespeare or the Old Testament. This is Profound L3’s sibling: imported voltage again, worn as diction instead of dropped as a payload.

O gentle morning,
thou hast blest the sparrow’s song—
my heart, it takes wing

Test: Scrutinize any poem with “Oh”—or just “O,” yes, you’ll see this—or words like “blest” and “thou.” Additionally, any commas in L1 and L3 deserve a hard look because they’re often showing the poem preaching from atop the mountain.

The specimen above fails on every count: the O, the thou, the blest, and both commas. L1’s comma is the poem addressing the morning like a congregation, L3’s is the poem pausing to smell its own fart.

Why This Exists: Distrust of ordinary language.

Inert L2

The middle line bears no load. It merely occupies the space between L1 and L3 while they do all the work.

Test: Remove L2. If the poem becomes cleaner, stronger, or essentially unchanged, the line was inert.

Inertness is one symptom with several causes, and the cause tells you what the writer was afraid of.

Bridge: connective tissue ferrying the reader from L1 to L3. The fear: the reader can’t cross the gap alone.

the river at dusk
and I think about the time
we never went back

Remove line two.

the river at dusk
we never went back

Better.

Defense: a clause that manages interpretation instead of making meaning. The fear: being misread.

This one is mine, resurrected from my “bad” folder.

let’s please stop talking
not because I don’t care but
we’re underwater

Remove line two.

let’s please stop talking
we’re underwater

Better. Notice what the deletion gives back: with the defense gone, just enough gap opens between “let’s stop talking” and “we’re underwater” that the reader builds the bridge themselves.

Ballast: words present only to satisfy the syllable count. The fear: the count.

the coffee grows cold
as I sit here waiting for
your car to pull in

We’ve seen this one. Look at “as I sit here waiting for.” Five of those seven syllables exist because the count demanded them.

Swappers

The poem has no directionality.

empty parking lot
the sound of rain
a flickering streetlight

Test: Swap L1 and L3.

a flickering streetlight
the sound of rain
empty parking lot

Same poem. Same experience. If L1 and L3 can trade places without materially changing the poem, it probably lacks:

  • a turn
  • cut logic
  • escalation
  • causal movement
  • an associative hinge
  • a change in what the reader knows

Importantly, a poem does not fail merely because the reversed version remains grammatical. It fails when the reversal preserves the same experience and force.

Why This Exists: The poem was composed as a picture, not an event.

Ones That Hold

Now run the battery on poems that pass.

job interview
the suit I buried
my father in

  • Sentence Integrity Check: de-lineated it’s still a sentence, but the lineation is doing something. “the suit I buried” makes you think, for half a second, that the suit is what got buried. Then “my father in” reconfigures everything.
  • Swappers: swap L1 and L3 and the poem breaks.
  • Inert L2: L2 is load-bearing. It’s where the misreading lives.
  • Weak/Profound L3: it ends on the image, on a preposition, and trusts you to feel the rest.

Another, plainer. One of mine.

ripples on the lake
a trailing wake widens—
otter on its back

No misreading, no pun, no persona. Just evidence before cause: you see the water first, you find the animal last, and “on its back” retroactively converts the wake from transit to leisure. It passes everything.

One more of mine, from the “bad” folder. Up to this point, we’ve talked only about haiku. But the tests work at longer lengths because they don’t measure syllables. They measure whether lines exert pressure on each other, so they should transfer to any short poem. Not as a quality gate; as a rough guide to where the load lives.

It’s All Right

I woke to “Here Comes the Sun”
playing from your nightstand.

It goes on. Then—

quiet.

Here comes the sun.

Quiet.

It goes on.

Run the tests.

  • Sentence Integrity Check: the lineation isn’t breaking sentences, it’s transcribing time.
  • Line Jam: the nightstand is load-bearing. The alarm is still set and nobody is turning it off.
  • Swappers: “It goes on” appears twice, and the poem’s entire payload is the distance between the first occurrence and the last. Reverse anything and the accumulation dies.
  • Inert lines: “quiet” is one word, no image, no tension. But try deleting it and the poem collapses into a stuck record instead of a cycle.
  • Weak L3: “It goes on” is, out of context, the most bumper-sticker consolation in the language. It’s “hope endures” wearing a trucker hat. But it passes because the phrase is anchored to a literal mechanism, the alarm resuming.

The taxonomy is a haiku instrument the way a stethoscope is a chest instrument. That’s where it was calibrated, not where it stops working.

What the Tests Can’t See

One more thing, in fairness to the limits. These tests detect structural death. They cannot see the things that make a poem alive such as voice, register, charm, or strangeness. A poem can pass every check and still be nothing.

This is a smoke detector, not a beauty meter. It has no opinion on genius.

This is not a flaw. It’s the same thing Professor Foster’s archive couldn’t do: knowing where answers go off the rails never solved a problem for me. It told me where to double-check. The solving was still mine.

Sidebar: Professor Foster, you’re a goddamn hero. You changed a life. Thank you.

One Last Specimen

On r/haiku there is a poem that is only the word “doot,” seventeen times, 5-7-5.

Doot doot doot doot doot
Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot
Doot doot doot doot doot

Run the tests.

  • Sentence Integrity Check: de-lineation is impossible. There is no sentence to recover, no prose the Return key damaged. The poem cannot be reduced to what it says because it says nothing. Cleanest pass in this essay, alarmingly.
  • Line Jam: substitute any doot for a vaguely evocative object and the poem is destroyed instantly. Although, “Fish fish fish fish fish” has its own charm.
  • Inert L2: delete the middle line and the doots are still there unchanged.
  • Weak/Profound L3: no moral, no slogan, no behold. If doot is an image, that is what it ends on.
  • Swappers: the poem is a palindrome. Reversal preserves everything, which should be a fail except the preservation is arguably the point. The first undecidable result the instrument has ever produced.

Four passes and a paradox.

So is the form doing work? The doots are the case where form is doing all the work. The smoke detector cannot tell an empty room from a quiet one.

I don’t know what to do about that. By the time you’ve counted the syllables to check the math, the sound has already entered you.