Hello all, Björn here. Today I think it is time to return to one of my favorite poetic tools in poetry which is to use negation in poetry.

Have you ever struggled to describe something complex with layers and only coming up with metaphors that feel like clichés?. It could be your love, a friendship or your depression, and rather than trying to describe a loved one as a rose for the hundredth’s time, maybe it can be replaced with something more interesting.

It has a (latin) name – namely via negativa, and we first did it back in 2018 and hosted by me and again in January 2025. The origin goes back to theology and the problem of describing God, where it was suggested that instead of describing what God is, to describe everything God is not.

In poetry this has been used in some of the most famous and loved poems.

Consider for instance Pablo Neruda in the first stanza of his 17th sonnet.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Note how he describes his love as something that isn’t a cliché and then something much darker or secret. To me this makes the love go far beyond infatuation to something else.

Negations can be used to question the usual, and remember to combine it with a list using neither nor, maybe in the end coming up with that perfect metaphor for your feeling. In poetry it is in the combination of describing something with negations as well as without it where you reach something truly remarkable.

Another tip that sometimes works for me is to work with opposites, what happens if you negate both?

Maybe you can take an old poem and negate something, and see what happens.

When you have written your poem to your blog, link back to dVerse, enter it in Mr Linky below, remember to visit the other poets linking up read and comment and have fun.