Why Poetry is Every Writer’s Secret Weapon
And how to start your own poetry practice
As a writing facilitator and coach, one of my favorite classes to teach is poetry. It’s not because I’m a great poet myself and it’s certainly not because my students are excited—if anything, the most common reactions people have when they learn we’re going to write poems are fear and dread.
I’ve lost count of how many people have told me they “aren’t poetry people.” When confronted by a poem, they feel awkward, or like they’re back in high school English and bored to tears. They certainly can’t imagine writing a sonnet or a ballad or any of the other forms they half-remember.
But if you want to hone your writing skills, it’s worth your time to give poetry another chance.
Poetry belongs in your toolbox
You don’t need to be an aspiring poet to get value from reading and writing poetry. Whatever genre you write in, poetry has something to offer. Here are three great reasons to include poetry in your writers’ toolkit.
Poetry helps you learn your craft
Poetry is the written form that pays the closest attention to language itself: the way a line is put together matters. How the words sound together matters. I sometimes think of poetry as a giant communal jigsaw puzzle made up out of all the words in the English language; poets are gathering just the right puzzle pieces to create an image, a mood, a feeling that makes sense.
When you read poetry, you learn to think about how language is put together. When you try writing poetry, you’ll force yourself to really consider the words you’re using.
Words are the raw material of our art form: if you want to become a better writer, paying deep attention to words is necessary — and poetry is a great way to learn how to do that.
And while many people find the forms of poetry intimidating, it’s worth noting that 1) constraints can be a really great way to stretch yourself creatively and 2) there’s nothing that says a poem has to follow any particular format. Poems don’t have to rhyme. Poems don’t have to be a certain number of lines long. As a writer, you can decide what makes a poem a poem.
Poetry forces you to ditch cliches
When you immerse yourself in poetry is that you’ll learn how to move away from generic or cliched writing. Poetry — good poetry — is precise. Whatever genre you write in, you want to strive towards being as specific as possible. Don’t tell me the apple was red and round. I want to know about the divots on the surface of the apple. I want to know how the weight of it feels in your hand. I want to watch ribbons of apple peel curling under a knife, a careful unwrapping. Poets strive to put the ordinary material of life under a microscope and reveal its mysteries again. Spending time reading and writing poetry can help you to approach the world with the same level of wonder.
Sometimes, as someone who mostly works in long-form prose, it’s easy to get lazy and let some imprecise or cliched language in there. A novel is long — I can probably get away with fluffing here and there, right?
But poems — even most epic poems — just don’t have as much space. There’s not as much room to hide in a poem. It’s part of what can make them feel so vulnerable to write and share. Writing a poem kicks you into a higher gear — and it's good practice to keep you on top of your game whenever you do go back to your primary genre.
Poetry can unlock your ideas
If you’re ever feeling blocked, consider trying to write a poem. Most writers know all too well that feeling of not knowing where to start; or having something to say but feeling unsure how to get it out.
Poetry, for me, is often a way of sidestepping a block. Writing a poem stops me from trying to force something that isn’t happening, and gets my brain working in another direction. Sometimes, I just get enough distraction that I can go back to whatever I was working on feeling refreshed. Other times, I find my poem actually gets to the core of what I was trying to write about in the first place. It’s not a technique that works 100% of the time, but I’ve never regretted giving it a go.
How to get started writing poetry
If you’re new to poetry, it might feel daunting to get started. Here’s some easy ways to start exploring poetry as part of your poetry practice:
- Create a blackout or cutout poem. This is one of my favorites. Take a piece of junk mail or an article or any other piece of writing you care to name. And then, make a poem by either blacking out words or by physically cutting the words from the page. For inspiration, take a look at how Kate Baer turns the hate message she receives into poems.
- Journal. If you’re a prose writer, start out where you feel comfortable. Sit down and write for ten or twenty minutes, just letting yourself explore whatever comes to mind. When you’re done take a look over what’s emerged. Underline any words that stand out to you. And then rewrite your piece, trying to distill down your words, capturing the essence of what you wrote about as a poem.
- Discover poets you *actually* like. Look, you don’t have to like any of those dead white guys you had to study in school. In the same way that you won’t like every novel or every film or every song in the world, you won’t like every poem. That’s ok. Start figuring out what you do like. A really easy place to start discovering lots of different kinds of poems is to listen to Padraig O’Tuama’s podcast, Poetry Unbound. You could also read the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day.
- Take inspiration from a poet. When you find a poem that moves you, use it as a jumping-off point. Borrow a line from the poem. Write a response to it. Being in conversation with other poets (even poets who are long gone) is a venerable tradition; find where your voice fits.
- Play with a really simple form. One day you may decide you want to write a sestina or a villanelle. But you don’t have to start there. Form is about putting a constraint on yourself and then seeing what happens. Make every line only three words long. Write an alphabet poem, where each line starts with the next letter of the alphabet. Write a poem where the first line starts with only one word, the second line has two words, the third line has three words and so on. Pick one of the forms on this list and try it out.
The takeaway
Many of us are nursing a hangover from high school classes when our teachers seemed to be on a mission to make poetry seem as dense and boring and irrelevant to our lives as they could. But if you can shake off that hangover, there’s so much richness to discover in reading and writing poetry.
And if you’re nervous to give it a go? Take the advice of Eve Merriam in her poem, How to Eat a Poem: “Don’t be polite. Bite in.”
