How to Write Personal Poetry That Feels Honest, Not Overwritten
Updated: 2 days ago
A personal poem can sound false even when every word of it is true. You know what happened; you know how much it hurt. On the page, though, the feeling comes out in phrases you have read a hundred times. That does not mean the experience was ordinary. It may mean you reached for familiar language before finding your own.
Write down what you remember before deciding what it means
Try making a short account of the moment in ordinary sentences. Where were you? What did the other person say? What did you do immediately afterward? Leave out anything you cannot actually remember. The detail you nearly dismiss may be the one worth keeping.
Imagine a poem about a goodbye. “I was devastated” tells us the feeling. Someone folding the same receipt while the other person talks gives us a way to encounter it. That detail only belongs in your poem if it fits the memory, of course. A convincing object chosen at random can feel just as borrowed as a familiar phrase.
Listen for the words you would actually use
Read a draft aloud as if you were telling one person what happened. Notice where your voice changes into a performance. Would you really say “the depths of my sorrow,” or would you say you could not bear to go home? Either can work in the right poem. The question is whether the language belongs to this speaker, here.
You can keep strange language, repetition, and long sentences. Poetry would be dull without them. Give each choice something to do: a repetition might sound like someone struggling to accept an answer, while a long sentence might let a memory run further than the speaker intended.
A line break should change the reading
A sentence does not become more intimate simply because it occupies six lines. Read it as prose first. Then try breaking it where the reader might hesitate, where a word needs a little time, or where the next phrase changes what came before. If every break produces the same pause, try a different length.
Watch the last line in particular. It is tempting to explain what the experience taught you. Sometimes that explanation closes down a poem that was more interesting while it was uncertain. Try stopping one line earlier and see what remains.
Keep something difficult
Honesty includes feelings that do not flatter the speaker. You might miss someone and feel relieved they left. You might be grateful for care and irritated by the person offering it. Let the contradiction stay long enough to become part of the poem.
After a little time away, return to the draft and underline the lines you could not have written about a different experience. Those are useful places to begin revising. Build around them, and see how much of the explanation you still need.
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Viola Musaraj is a writer, novelist, micro and vertical drama producer, and interactive narrative designer with more than 140 million reads worldwide.
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