I’m not a poet, but I regularly write poetry because writing poetry is one of the best ways to clarify your message and generally become a stronger and more confident poetry writer.
The first poetry class I ever took was with an incredible poet named Marie Ponsot. Everything she taught us arrived as insight I carried beyond the classroom and into the writing courses I teach twenty years later.
Although we did at times write in meter and poetic form, the class itself focused much more on becoming fully aware of the words we put on the page. We considered how they fit together and how they modify and complement each other.
I learned more in her class about writing novels and fiction than I have in any other setting because poetry shifts your perspective. It forces you to be more aware of your choice of words and how they fit together. You must be more aware of the ways theme and metaphor work together in your larger body of work.
In that class, I learned five main lessons that have allowed me to use poetry to complement the fiction, non-fiction, and other stories I write.
I’ve also included examples of poems to illustrate each lesson as well as a couple of questions to help you dig into the deeper levels of each poem and how the poet has used language to create a deeper impact on you as a reader.
It helps you understand who is speaking.
We often forget the narrator when we write prose. Unless the narrator is a character in the book, we often forget the narrator exists. It’s a voice telling a story, but when carelessly lose track of the narrator, we’ve let go of a major character.
You simply cannot do this with poetry. The lines are too short and the meaning is too precise. If you’re not clear on who is speaking, the poem won’t make any sense.
Marie Ponsot’s gorgeous poem “Between” shares the story of a girl and mother. They’re growing up and changing in the normal ways every human being experiences. There are a number of people in the poem. If we don’t know who is speaking, we lose the underlying meaning of the poem.
Questions: Who is the main voice in the poem? How does it change from the beginning of the poem to the end? What does the (for my daughter) dedication at the beginning of the poem add to the story told?
It brings you into your body.
We feel the most powerful writing in our bodies and our bones. Intense emotion or universal human experiences such as joy, grief, or depression can never be fully explained using words. Instead, we allow words to create an atmosphere of emotion, one that allows us to understand through experience. A gut punch. A heart lift. A stomach drop.
Marie Ponsot’s incredibly painful poem “Winter” tells the story of a parent wishing they knew what to say to another parent who has just lost a child to suicide. It illustrates how you can use words to create an emotion you feel in your bones.
Questions: Which lines did you feel in your body as you read them? What did you feel? Where did you feel it? And how do those emotions create the overall meaning of the poem?
It helps you choose better words.
You can use as many words as you want in prose. Repeat or don’t. Use a big word or a small one. Let your dialogue flow and tell the story. Sure, we generally want to cut words that aren’t needed in prose, but extra words in poetry make the difference in how your readers will understand.
For example, say you choose the word “joy” over “exultation.” Each word affects the rhythm and meter of the line. It also changes the meaning, as every word has connotations and connections.
Take Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones.” It tells the story of a parent who wants to teach her children about the world. Even with so much bad in the world—“at least fifty percent terrible”— the voice of the poem wants her children to see the world as fixable.
The poem never uses the word “fix” or anything similar. We understand the term “good bones” as something people say related to real estate that the world is our home and we can make it beautiful.
Questions: What effect does the repetition of words such as “delicious ill-advised ways” and “I keep this from my children” tell us about the nature of the speaker and her relationship with her children? Does she take responsibility for the state of the world and fixing it? How do you feel about the main voice of the poem?
It allows you to see structure more clearly.
Structure is to writing as bones are to the body. Without it, you have no shape. You just have a jumble of words and ideas thrown together with no form. Structure guides your reader from the beginning of the story to the end while offering a way to connect the imagery and themes in your writing, allowing the meaning of your writing to go deeper.
But structure in fiction can be a squirrelly thing with so many characters, dialogues, and extra bits. Structure in poetry can often be clearly seen on the page.
A Shakespearean sonnet, for example, has fourteen lines broken into three four-line stanzas and one couplet at the end. The first stanza asks a question. The second adds more information to the question. The final shifts what we’ve learned in the first two stanzas. The couplet, in conjunction with everything else we’ve read, answers the question.
Check out Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” for how that works.
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Over the course of the poem, we see the calls to action at the beginning of each stanza begin with a passive call to freedom and transform into a noble call to reclaim humanity by taking action. They begin the poem as simply “not hogs” then over the course of the poem they name themselves as noble kinsmen. By the final couplet, this group of people have not only reclaimed themselves but have made the conscious choice to die with integrity instead of continuing to live in fear.
Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” does not have the same formal structure and rules as a sonnet. Nonetheless, each section of the poem brings you step by step through a story until by the end you reach a deeper understanding of the message of the poem.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Questions: Where would you separate “The Guest House” into sections? What does each section tell you about the story? How does each add to the story until you reach the final message of “being grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond?”
It teaches you the movement of language.
The lines of prose slip one into the other. There’s rarely much variation beyond noting who is talking and where ideas begin and end. The rules of punctuation are there to guide you according to a set standard.
Poetry, by contrast, challenges the way you think about the movement of a sentence or phrase. It plays with form and punctuation to change the way you read the line and how the language changes when you split the words in different ways.
Take Gwendolyn Brook’s poem “We Real Cool.”
The poem begins with a full, albeit short, sentence plus an additional word that in prose would belong on the next line. From that point on, each line is two truncated sentences. The final affect is that of the word “we” repeating in our heads over and over. We. We. We. Separating the voices speaking from their actions.
By contrast, the lines of Langston Hughes’ poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers flow more fully. Some lines are short and then pull back. Others continue flowing into the next line. The movement of the poem is like the river of its title.
Questions: Read each poem and look for lines and words that repeat. What impact does repetition have on you as the reader in each poem?
It forces you to know exactly what you want your audience to understand.
When writing prose, it’s easy to lose track of the underlying message and meaning of your story because you’re balancing longer blocks of text. You’re also more likely to include dialogue, subplots, and sections that may not belong at all.
Poetry is much more direct. Each poem is about a specific thing. There can be myriad emotions, ideas, images, and themes throughout the poem, but in order to write a solid poem, you must know exactly what you want your readers to understand and feel when they finish reading your writing. That’s what your story is about.
While the “about” of a short story or book must also be clear and specific, it often gets muddled when looking at the full piece of writing. Poetry becomes clearer the more you read, as long as you follow each image and idea throughout the poem. You have to pay attention to find the “about,” but it is there. It’s much easier to lose the main message of a piece of prose. Writing poetry helps you practice honing in on the main message of your story and helps to make sure your writing is clean, clear, and readily available to your audience.
Questions: Review the poetry mentioned in this article. “Good Bones.” “If We Must Die.” “Winter.” Any of them. What is the main message of each? Use the other lessons here to guide you. Where do you feel the lesson in your body? How does it make you feel?
There is much more to poetry than these five lessons, and I urge you to continue reading and writing poetry to bolster your prose writing. Whether you write fiction, content for websites, or nonfiction, poetry can help you sharpen your writing skills and deepen your craft.
Additional resources for reading and writing poetry:
A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop
47 of Your Favorite Writers Share Their Favorite Poems from Lithub
7 Poetry Collections for Prose Writers from Writing Cooperative
The Essential Rumi, expanded edition. Translated by Coleman Barks.
American Academy of Poets website.
The Poetry Foundation website.
