Writing poems regularly is quietly life-changing, in a way that goes beyond any other kind of writing. I’ve always been a journaler / notebook scribbler, I did “morning pages” for years, I’ve been writing fiction consistently since 2006, and from age 13 on, I’d write poems when they struck.
But when I started writing poems regularly (daily, in fact), it transformed me. And my poetry, and all my writing, but the biggest sea-change was how I lived in the world and in myself.
Why is writing poems so different? Journaling provides the same self-reflection, morning pages the same catharsis, stories the same sense of creative achievement. Writing poems regularly is more than the sum of those parts, though.
Something in the nature of poems lets us explore our feelings without getting stuck in them. The shape of a poem becomes a container, so we can reach into the feeling and still stand outside it: finding the exact image or shade of an emotion, while another objective self is also counting syllables, working out how to start the next line with a “p”, or planning to end this line with the word “exist”. And as I said in You Are Not Ark-Fleet B, afterwards, “where the emotion is, there’s also a poem.” The thing you’ve made continues to hold the feelings.
If writing stories is getting characters to act out our ideas, writing poems is finding imagery to speak them: so at the moment that we’re most focused on an emotion or thought, we’re also thinking intensely about things we can feel, smell, see, touch, hear. It becomes both mindfulness and sensory grounding. We’re not just wrapped in our feelings: we’re alive in our bodies.
We don’t always want to write about our feelings – so we can write about the whole world of marvellous and curious things. We reach out into the world, to write a poem about spores, and the world reaches back with an insight about hope and creativity. We write about clockwork machines and discover our own feelings about having a complicated body, and a way to navigate that.
Those are the poems that resonate, from writing poems regularly, but the beauty of writing them regularly is that you don’t know when that will happen. You’re not sitting down with a knotted throat and a tissue box, ready for the poem like for a counselling session. Some of them are just playing with words, or a strong opinion about a fairytale, or describing a painting you love, or grumping about Ian McEwan’s opinions on sci-fi, or a joke in rhyme, or trying out a technique. Even the resonant quietly transformative poems don’t always seem like it, at the time: I really thought one poem was just about spores, until I typed it up two weeks later. Now its final line shines for me in dark places like the light of Eärendil.
Writing poems regularly means you discover the joyful, light-hearted poems too. When we only reach to poems in moments of urgent need, that need is usually about heartbreak, loss, grief. Poems make excellent containers and carriers for those. But our lives are also full of delight, wit, fun, good food: all of those get to be in poems, too, and they live in our sense of self all the more vibrantly for being written about. Grinning at some bluebells in spring becomes a roundelay of joy that lives on year-round. One perfect June afternoon on the green is framed as a timeless part of your life in its sestina. A hasty haiku is forever your cousins laughing in the firelight. The sheer regularity of writing poems regardless invites our wholeness in, including our happiness.
Writing poems regularly definitely improved my writing. My poetry vaulted in quality and at last was regularly, near-routinely accepted by journals and magazines. My fiction brightened with musicality and more powerful word choices, and sharpened with my newfound concision. But those are fringe benefits, compared to the quietly life-changing process and practice of simply writing poems, regularly.
If you want to explore writing poems regularly, the Meddling with Poetry course this Oct–Nov will introduce you to heaps of different poetry forms, approaches, and facets of language, all through playful workshop-style classes.
Join online from anywhere (Thurs evenings UK time) OR in person in Oxford (Wed evenings). Plus each week’s Poem-A-Day booklet gives you everything you need if you want to try the transformative poem-a-day practice, during the course or afterwards.
Click here to find out what you'll explore and to book your place.
