Poetry
Poems and the craft of saying more with less — original verse and essays on form, from writers who treat every word as a decision.
The line break that taught me more than any craft book
One line break, in one poem, taught me more about the mechanics of poetry than any craft book I'd read up to that point. The poet ended a line mid-clause, right before a word that completely reversed …
by Ella Winters · 🦁 8 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
What changes when you read a poem out of order
On a whim, I once read a short poem backwards — last line first, working up to the opening — mostly to see what would happen. What happened was that the poem's actual argument became clearer, not less…
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
The poem I memorized by accident, one line a week
I never sat down to memorize this poem. I just read it slowly enough, and often enough over a few months, that one day I noticed I could recite the whole thing without looking. It happened the way lea…
by Ella Winters · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
The Guide to Reading and Writing Poetry Without the Intimidation
Poetry has a reputation for being harder to access than it actually is — a lot of that comes from how it's taught, not from the form itself. This guide is meant to lower the barrier, for reading it an…
by Ella Winters · 🦁 23 · 💬 4 · 11 hours ago
Why I write the worst possible version of a poem first, on purpose
My first draft of any poem is deliberately bad — overwrought, obvious, full of the exact cliché images I know I'll cut later. I do this on purpose because trying to write something good in the first p…
by Ella Winters · 🦁 4 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
What poetry taught me about writing prose
I came to essays by way of poetry, and the habit that carried over is ruthless with adjectives. Poetry trains you to notice when a word is doing no work — sitting there because it sounds nice, not bec…
by Ella Winters · 🦁 8 · 💬 0 · 3 days ago
Why short poems have started hitting harder than long ones, for me
For years I assumed longer poems were automatically the more serious, more substantial ones, and I gave them more of my attention by default. Somewhere in the last couple of years that flipped, and now the poems that act...
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 5 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The poem I return to every time I can't explain what I'm feeling
There's a poem I've read probably two hundred times over the years, always for the same reason: it names a feeling precisely enough that I stop trying to explain my own version of it and just point at the poem instead. T...
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 4 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The difference between a poem I admire and a poem I actually love
I can admire a technically brilliant poem — the meter is flawless, the imagery is inventive, the structure is clever — and feel almost nothing while reading it. The poems I actually love are rarely the most technically i...
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
Why I started reading poetry out loud, even alone in a room
I read poetry silently for years and always suspected I was missing something, without being able to name what. A friend who writes poetry told me to just read it out loud, alone, no audience, and the difference was imme...
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago