Why Write Poetry?

In honor of National Poetry Writing Month (and of course, the release of The Tortured Poets Department), I thought I would share some not-so-coherent thoughts on writing poetry. I’ll be posting some more of my poetry in the coming weeks (and you can read “The Girl in Pink” here), so I wanted to speak about my own experience with writing some of the poems that you will hopefully read soon.

I don’t claim to be a poet. Fiction is my love and though I suffer a severe amount of self-loathing and doubt while writing, I like to think I’m at least sort of good at it (but maybe you can go read one of my short stories and tell me otherwise…). But when it comes to writing poems, I don’t try to pretend like I’m any good. I don’t foresee getting a poem published or anthologized anytime soon. When I read my poetic friends’ work, I’m blown away by the lines they come up with, the metaphors they use, how they make me think “SO TRUE” while also leaving me wordless when I try to explain what is true about it. So if I’m not aiming to publish my poems or be a poet, if I’m not going to spend hours and hours trying to write better poems when I could be using that time to attempt the next Great American novel, then why write poetry at all?

The Irish countryside… very poetic.

The simple answer is that I write poems because they make me happy. When I go back and read what I’ve written, I want to be delighted, giddy. That doesn’t mean that all of my poems are about happy things—I’ve written some pretty vulnerable poems about insecurity, grief, and heartbreak—but still, when I read them I want to be able to smile. Usually that means I make them rhyme. Since the rise of modernism in the 20th century, rhyming has become less of a convention of poetry, but I love a good rhyming poem. I love having a rhythm, even a sing-song feel to my poems, and maybe that’s part of the reason why I feel like I’m a bad poet. Sometimes I write free verse, but I feel totally lost while doing it. As someone who lives by routine and structure, rhyme and rhythm are sometimes my greatest friends while struggling through a poem. And even if the poem has the most depressing lines I’ve ever written, if the last two lines end with “cat” and “sat,” I will be grinning.

The perhaps more complex answer is that I write poems because sometimes I don’t know what else to do. Sometimes poetry feels like the only response. I don’t believe this is only true of myself. Last week, I turned in my final paper for my Holocaust history class, where I researched and wrote about Jews responding to persecution through poetry. You wouldn’t believe how many Jews wrote poems in the face of unimaginable suffering, even when simply writing a poem could have cost them their lives. There were poems written both by well-renowned writers of the time and by women and children who were otherwise unknown. There was a twelve-year-old boy who wrote a poem while imprisoned in a concentration camp in North Africa and a woman who scribbled a secret poem on the back of a work slip. Suffering produced desperation and desperation produced art. In reading all of these poems, there was an undeniable sense that their authors needed to write; it was the only possible response.

On a lighter and more personal note, I have seen many of my friends respond to their experiences with poetry, even those who do not claim to be poets or writers at all. I believe that as humans, we all have something in us that draws us to creation and artistic expression, and writing a poem can just be a fun way to create and express ourselves, like sketching a picture or acting in a musical. To quote my friend Zoe’s favorite phrase, “That’s so human of you.” Art has something to do with our humanity, and if we can debunk the notion that to write a poem, you have to be super deep and philosophical or something, then we can open up space for more people to have fun with their humanity.

A sunrise over my backyard… also very poetic.

So write the crappy poem or the good-not-great poem or the Pulitzer Prize-winning poem. If you write a dorky little poem, no one is making you share it with anyone, so what’s the harm? (Or you can be like me and post your dorky little poems for the world to see.) If poetry still isn’t your thing, then try other forms of art to delight in, whether that’s music or painting or theater or photography. But whatever you do, don’t take yourself too seriously.

Now that I think about it, I guess that’s the main reason I write poems: to practice not taking myself too seriously. When I’m writing a short story or a novel, it’s easy to be hard on myself, to worry that my work will never see the light of day or that I’ll never be any good at the thing I want to do with the rest of my life. But writing a little poem? Who cares if it’s any good, if it makes me blush or giggle, if it stays hidden in my journal? I’ll still write it. There’s joy and delight in writing poetry, something that I think gets overshadowed in academia or our overall perception of poetry. Even if we’re writing about hard things, a ray of happiness can be found in a rhyme or a turn of phrase. Poetry at its simplest is only a form of delight in language.

And now I want to leave you with one of my favorite poems I’ve found lately, “The Orange” by Wendy Cope. This poem went viral on TikTok, and I think one of the reasons it did is because so many people resonated with the sheer joy of it. It’s a goofy, sweet little poem that still speaks of humanity and the delight that can be found in life and in writing.

The Orange

by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime, I bought a huge orange—

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I got a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.

This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I’m glad I exist.