A Confession to Start
I am not a poet and I do not even like most poetry. But poetry taught me things about prose that nothing else did. You do not have to love a thing to learn from it.Share on X
Let me be honest, because pretending otherwise would be worse. I am not a poet. Over a lifetime of writing I have written almost no poetry, and for the most part I do not even enjoy reading it.
That is not the confession of someone who never tried. I have 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 do not have to love a thing to respect what it does, and poetry does things that taught me about writing even though I mostly do not enjoy it.
What I Actually 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 is 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 not mood pieces. They are narratives, and they have survived for thousands of years because the story underneath the verse is gripping.
That is the kind of poetry I respond to, and it is no accident that the one poem I ever wrote is narrative too. It is 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 is 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.
What Prose Writers Can Steal From Poems
Here is why even a committed prose writer should pay attention on March 21. Poetry is the most concentrated form of writing there is, and concentration is a skill every writer needs.
A poem cannot waste a word. There is no room. Every word has to earn its place, carry weight, 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 lands, 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 do not have to write verse to steal these lessons. Compression and rhythm make any writing better, and poetry is where they are taught in their purest form.
You Do Not Have to Love It to Use It
This is the part I want a fellow skeptic to hear. Disliking poetry does not exempt you from learning from it.
I will probably never sit down for an evening of sonnets by choice. But I have 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 do not even particularly enjoy. That is not a contradiction. It is just how learning works. You take what is useful and leave the rest.
So if you are a prose writer who breaks out in hives at the word poetry, you do not 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 will not mind that you came for the technique and skipped the worship.
How to Mark World Poetry Day
Read one poem. Just one. If you love poetry, you do not need my encouragement. If you do not, 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 have written and cut it the way a poet would, until only the words that earn their place are left. Read it aloud and listen to the rhythm. You will probably find it got stronger. That is poetry teaching prose, which is the most useful thing poetry ever did for me.
You do not 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 actually write.