A Confession to Start
I am not a poet and I don’t even like most poetry. But poetry taught me things about prose that nothing else did. You don’t have to love a thing to learn from it.Share on X
Pretending otherwise would be worse. I’m not a poet. Over a lifetime of writing I’ve written almost no poetry, and for the most part I don’t even enjoy reading it.
That’s not the confession of someone who never tried. I’ve read the big ones. The Odyssey and the Iliad. Dante’s Inferno. Milton.
And when I read them, I went looking for the translations that read least like poems and most like stories, the narrative versions that told me what happened without making me wade through the verse to find it. That tells you exactly where my taste sits.
So why am I writing about World Poetry Day at all? Because you don’t have to love a thing to respect what it does, and poetry does things that taught me about writing even though I mostly don’t enjoy it.
Watch: Celebrating World Poetry Day 2021 with Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky', Seven Stories
What I Like Is Narrative
The epics survived three thousand years because they told stories, not because they rhymed. The poetry was the delivery system. The story was the cargo.Share on X
Here’s the pattern in what little poetry I love. It tells a story. The Odyssey is a man trying to get home. The Iliad is a war and the rage inside it. Dante walks through hell.
Milton stages a cosmic rebellion. These are narratives, and they’ve survived for thousands of years because the story underneath the verse is gripping.
That’s the kind of poetry I respond to, and it’s no accident that the one poem I ever wrote is narrative too.
It’s called The Ghostwriter’s Holiday Tale, a riff on Twas the Night Before Christmas about the strange magic of ghostwriting. It rhymes, it has a beat, and most importantly it tells a little story from beginning to end. The ghostwriter even arrives like Santa and calls out the craft like reindeer:
“Now pacing, now style, now arcs that compel!
On tension, on dialogue, on tales to retell!”
When I reached for poetry myself, I reached for the kind that carries a narrative, because that’s the kind that ever made sense to me.
If you think you hate poetry, you may just hate a certain kind. Try the poems that tell stories. You might find the door was never locked, only mislabeled.
| Poem | The story underneath |
|---|---|
| The Odyssey | A man trying to get home |
| The Iliad | A war and the rage inside it |
| Dante's Inferno | Dante walks through hell |
| Milton | A cosmic rebellion |
| The Ghostwriter's Holiday Tale | A ghostwriter arrives like Santa |
What Prose Writers Can Steal From Poems
Even a committed prose writer should pay attention on March 21, because poetry is the most concentrated form of writing there is, and concentration is a skill every writer needs.
A poem can’t waste a word. There’s no room. Every word has to justify its place, mean something, and often do two jobs at once. That discipline is exactly what most prose lacks. Most writing is padded, hedged, and loose. A poet would cut half of it on instinct, because a poet learns early that the strongest writing is the writing with nothing extra in it.
Poetry also teaches rhythm. The way a sentence sounds, where it speeds up and where it slows, is something poets obsess over and prose writers mostly ignore.
But a paragraph has rhythm too, and the writers whose prose feels alive are usually the ones who hear it. You don’t have to write verse to steal these lessons. Compression and rhythm make any writing better, and poetry is where they’re taught in their purest form.
You Do Not Have to Love It to Use It
If you’re a fellow skeptic, disliking poetry doesn’t exempt you from learning from it.
I’ll probably never sit down for an evening of sonnets by choice.
But I’ve read enough poetry to absorb the two things it does better than any other form, say more with less, and make the words sound like something. Those two skills made my prose better, and I picked them up from a form I don’t even enjoy. That’s how learning works. You take what’s useful and leave the rest.
So if you’re a prose writer who breaks out in hives at the word poetry, you don’t have to convert. You just have to read a few poems with a writer’s eye, watch how they compress and how they sound, and carry those habits back to your own work. The poets won’t mind that you came for the technique and skipped the worship.
How do you mark World Poetry Day?
Read one poem. Just one. If you love poetry, you don’t need my encouragement. If you don’t, pick a narrative poem, something that tells a story, and read it for the craft instead of the mood. Notice how few words it uses and how every one of them works.
If you write prose, do one small experiment. Take a paragraph you’ve written and cut it the way a poet would, until only the words you need are left. Read it aloud and listen to the rhythm. You’ll probably find it got stronger. That’s poetry teaching prose, the most useful thing poetry ever did for me.
Compression and rhythm are the two lessons poetry teaches prose.
You don’t have to become a poet. I never did. But World Poetry Day is a fine excuse to borrow the one craft that takes compression and sound more seriously than any other, and to bring a little of that discipline home to whatever you write.