How Poetry Makes Me a Better Romance Writer

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “The Favorite Poet” (1888)

“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” —Marianne Moore, “Poetry” (1919)

A lot of people really, really don’t like poetry.

Look, I get it. I do! It can feel totally inaccessible, especially when the structure is complex or there isn’t a clear bridge between language and meaning. That inaccessibility is sometimes alienating. This isn’t for you, the poem seems like it’s saying. Go away. You’re not good enough to understand me.

Or maybe your first exposures to poetry were miserable experiences, where you were forced to torture insights out of Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost. Frequently, my poetry-hating students tell me they were taught that each poem holds within it The One True Correct Interpretation: one that the author “wants” us to reach. Reading poetry, they believe, is about uncovering that Holy Grail.

Honestly, who the hell would like poetry, if they had that kind of relationship dynamic with it? Why would anyone want to spend their one wild and precious life doing detective work to track down some stranger’s intention, peering at each word and comma and line break with the goal of Being Correct? Not me.

If you relate personally to any of the above feelings or experiences, I want you to know two things.

First: poetry can be for you, if you want it to be! You are “good enough”—capable enough—to enjoy it, to find it meaningful. Everyone is.

And second: there is no such thing as The One True Correct Interpretation.

In fact, “correct” just might be the worst possible framework through which to experience poetry. “Correct” implies a relationship with fact that completely sidesteps what poetry can do: it can allow us to understand ourselves and others in ways that expand our sense of what’s imaginable. What the author supposedly wants may, on very rare occasions, be a meaningful metric, but to focus on authorial intent is like going to Disneyland and spending the entire day in the parking lot. Sure, it might be connected; it’s also a choice that can prevent us from exploring way more interesting avenues.

When we throw out “correct” as an interpretive framework and substitute it with “persuasive,” the work of reading moves away from single-minded detection, expanding into a ray of gorgeous possibilities.

I firmly believe poetry can be and should be accessible to everyone. In a world where capitalism controls all, where education is increasingly funneled towards producing labor, where AI flattens prose into blandness, we need poetry to help remind us that we exist outside profit or objectives.

We’re ravenous for reminders of our deep connection with other humans. We’re starving for beauty.

The benefits of reading poetry go beyond opening us up to new or fulfilling ways of seeing the world. Poetry also leads us towards different ways of understanding writing. While I don’t want to imply that poetry’s primary purpose is to teach us something, I believe strongly that prose writers and readers can learn a lot from reading it.

I’m a better writer because I read poetry. I’m a better academic writer because I read poetry.

And I think I’m a better romance writer, in particular, because I read poetry.

Why? What have I learned from it?

Each word is important.

Poetry generally has far fewer words to work with than a novel, which means that each and every word has to be calibrated towards the poem’s goals. I don’t mean this in a “why is it THE Scarlet Letter rather than A Scarlet Letter” way; I mean that a poem needs to attend to the micro level. When you’ve got five lines, or fifteen, or even forty, there’s no fluff.

Natalie Díaz’s poem “From the Desire Field” includes these lines:

I want her green life. Her inside me
in a green hour I can’t stop.
Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.

In some ways, the use of “green” here feels pretty familiar, given that poetry’s been comparing desire to new growth for millennia. Repetition, though, makes “green” unsettling, and as the images get increasingly claustrophobic and intrusive, the word takes on new meanings. In the same way that new growth can describe spring or tumors, Díaz’s poem understands that desire can feel like rebirth or anxiety. “Green” connects all these metaphors—a life, an hour, a vein, a wing, a thorn—to build a holistic and complicated image of desire’s invasiveness.

Poetry shows us that there’s no such thing as filler. Each word is an opportunity to do something.

Yes, of course, sometimes that something is simply to bring the reader through the sentence and nothing more. And that’s fine. Not every word needs to be—or should be—brimming with meaning. But through poetry, I’ve learned that the little bones of a sentence deserve my attention.

Avoid clichés.

I know this doesn’t seem like a poetry-specific lesson, and it’s not. Avoiding clichés is something every good writer knows to aim for, no matter their genre! But it’s especially crucial with poetry, which tends to rely very heavily on imagery. Poetry’s primary defining element, I would argue, is that it gives readers a kind of alternate access into a subject. It looks sideways at a thing—often through imagery and figurative language—to paradoxically bring us closer to that thing. Clichés fail completely at that goal.

Take the final lines of Donika Kelly’s stunning (and hot as hell) poem about masturbation, “Desire Path: Near Equinox”:

[…] not near but soon. I fill the room,
a cloud scudding the moon, fingers
glinting in a light of my own making.

In these lines, the speaker is having an orgasm. Let’s be real, that’s pretty difficult to write about in new or revelatory ways. We usually think about orgasms as explosions, fireworks, and earthquakes, and the metaphor is so familiar, so well-trodden, that sometimes it doesn’t even feel like imagery anymore. It’s easy to gloss over.

With “Desire Path: Near Equinox,” the propulsive energy of the orgasm is still there in the verb—to scud is to be driven forward, usually by wind—but Kelly uses language we typically associate with the ethereal, not the explosive. We’re asked to see the orgasming speaker as vapor slipping against something celestial. Coming makes the speaker unreachable, intangible, beautiful. It’s a gorgeous way to describe an experience that often defies description.

Create a rhythm.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Visitor” has a speaker who's made repeated and increasingly worried invitations to someone they want to come visit. The speaker describes the invitation, still unanswered, as:

An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill
or arrive but moves silently in a direction.
Like a dark book in a long life with a vague
hope in a wood house with an open door.

These final lines include a long and relentless chain of similes. The similes build on one another, not necessarily in logical ways, and the anxious crescendo reminds me of the way nerves can make it hard to stop talking. The speaker seems terrified of being refused. There’s no formal meter here, but that doesn’t mean the anxious rhythm doesn’t still structure our experience of the poem.

We all know that sentences create rhythm, but poetry reminds us that sound and flow are central to what writing does. The way a text is written works together with the story a text tells to construct implicit meanings. Rhythm—just like plot, character development, POV, imagery, etc.—is an element that helps build a particular reading experience. In some respects, you can’t really disentangle rhythm from pacing, given that rhythm creates friction. It speeds us up, it slows us down, and takes us where the story’s going.

Step in feeling first.

This one’s a bit more personal.

I envy those who find it easy to access their feelings. For most of my life, it’s been easier for me to approach, well, everything by analyzing it. That’s my day job. I do it for fun, too. I love it.

But it’s a hell of a lot harder to let myself just feel.

When I teach poetry, I tell my students that, after they’ve read a poem—ideally at least twice—the first question I want them to ask themselves is, “How did this poem make me feel?” This helps take the pressure off them to “figure out” the poem. It also directs them to the most important thing a poem can do: to make a person feel something.

There are poets and poems I love and won’t ever teach because I don’t want to analyze their work. I’ve repeated lines to myself over and over and had no insights into what they might suggest. Instead, I just feel them. It’s the poem and me, the two of us spending time together in the gorgeous and terrifying vulnerability of being human on this earth. I can be sad, or in awe, or stunned, or simply glad to be alive, and that’s plenty.

Just like poetry, romance requires us to step in feeling first. The characters’ feeling, the book’s feeling, our feeling comes before anything else. If we’re going to believe in the HEA or the HFN, then the feeling is the foundation, the frame, the drywall, and the electricity. It’s everything. Romance is an unapologetic reminder to those of us who love to analyze—sometimes too much!—that emotion can be enough.

I don’t think I could’ve started writing romance if I hadn’t spent so much time with poetry first.

Some things are beyond language, and, at the same time, language is what we have. Romance brings us close to the feeling. Poetry does too. I’m so grateful for both.