I Wrote One Poem in My Whole Life
Writing one poem taught me more about compression and rhythm than years of prose. You don’t write it to become a poet. You write it to become a sharper writer.Share on X
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it here. I’m not a poet, and I don’t love poetry. But I’ve written exactly one poem in my life, and writing it taught me something I didn’t expect.
It’s called The Ghostwriter’s Holiday Tale, a parody of Twas the Night Before Christmas where a ghostwriter shows up like Santa to rescue a stuck author. It ends the way the original does, with a blessing tossed over the shoulder:
“Happy writing to all, and may your stories last!”
Writing it was harder than it looks, and that difficulty is the entire point of this post. National Poetry Month, which runs through April, is the perfect excuse to write one poem you’ll never show anyone, not to become a poet, but because of what the attempt does to you.
Watch: National Poetry Month, #PoetryDefined, Advocate Of Wordz
Poetry Forces What Prose Lets You Skip
Prose forgives padding. Poetry does not. Writing a poem is the fastest way to feel how much of your prose is just filler.Share on X
A single poem makes you do two things prose lets you cheat on.
The first is compression. In prose you can pad. You can hedge, repeat, over-explain, and the reader will mostly forgive you.
In a poem there’s no room. Every word has to matter, and when I was forcing my little Christmas parody to rhyme and scan, I felt exactly how much fat I normally leave in a sentence. The constraint exposed my padding in a way no editor ever had.
The second is rhythm. A poem has to sound right. You have to hear the beat of it, feel where the stress lands, notice when a line stumbles. Prose has rhythm too, but you can ignore it and still get published. Writing a poem turns that hearing back on. After wrestling with meter, I started noticing the rhythm of my prose sentences in a way I hadn’t before. That ear didn’t switch back off.
The Point Is the Attempt, Not the Result
The goal isn’t a good poem. The goal is what the attempt does to your writing.
My one poem is a fun little thing, not great literature, and I’m fine with that. (See also Emily Dickinson Day, on the poems she kept in a drawer) Its value to me was always the hour I spent fighting the form, cutting words to make a line fit, reading it aloud to hear whether it moved. That fight is the exercise, and you get the benefit whether the poem is any good or not.
This is true of any form you struggle with.
Writing something you’ll never master stretches muscles your comfortable form lets you forget. A novelist who writes a poem, a poet who writes a short story, a nonfiction writer who tries dialogue, each comes back to their home turf a little sharper for having been a beginner somewhere else. The discomfort is the work.
Why does a whole month of poetry help?
National Poetry Month gives you a full April, and a month matters here because it removes the excuse.
You’re not committing to a career or even to finishing anything good. You’re committing to write one poem sometime in the next thirty days. That’s a small enough ask that the usual reasons to put it off stop working.
Use the month as cover. Nobody has to see it. You’re not entering a contest or building a body of work. You’re doing a private exercise that happens to make your real writing better, under the umbrella of a holiday that gives you permission to try.
How to Write Your One Poem
Keep it small and give it a shape.
Don’t stare at a blank page waiting for inspiration. (More on a prompt journal, 301 Writing Ideas) Pick a form with rules, because the rules are the point. A rhyming parody of something familiar, like I did, is a forgiving place to start. So is a strict structure like a haiku or a limerick, where the constraint does half the work.
Then write badly and finish anyway. The first draft will be clumsy. Force it to rhyme or scan or fit the form regardless, because fighting the constraint is the exercise. Read it out loud, hear where it stumbles, fix the worst spots, and stop. You’re not polishing a masterpiece. You’re doing reps.
When you’re done, notice what changed. Go back to your normal writing and pay attention. You’ll probably find you cut more, hear more rhythm, and waste fewer words, because for one hour in April you wrote in a form that wouldn’t let you get away with any of it. That’s what poetry gives a non-poet, and it’s reason enough to write the one bad poem.
Fighting the form is the exercise, whether or not the poem is any good.
National Poetry Month FAQ
- National Poetry Month 30th Anniversary, Academy of American Poets
- National Poetry Month, Academy of American Poets