Writing a poem about life is a great challenge to your craft and a great opportunity for some serious self reflection. While there is never a template for writing a poem (unless your working with a fixed form like a sonnet or a haiku) there are some general guidelines that help you get started. Here are some tips on how to write a poem about life.
Tip #1: Honesty is the best poetry.
When you’re writing a poem about life—whether you’re writing about the life cycle or reflecting on a specific event in your life in particular— take the advice of Toronto street artist Gregory Allen Elliot: “Honesty is the best poetry.” The phrase, which can be found stenciled around the city streets, is a good rule to live by— in life and in poetry. As the old maxim goes, “write what you know,” but always approach your subject matter with straightforward sincerity. Some of the most enjoyable poems on life are brutally honest and reveal an unlikely or surprising truth, like Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” or John Donne’s “The Flea.”
Tip #2: Choose a strong metaphor.
When you think of life, what metaphor comes to mind? To you, is life a bowl of cherries, as the popular idiom goes, or is it more like a roller coaster, with ups and downs? Is life like a box of chocolate, as Forest Gump says? Maybe it’s a path, as the Bible or the Daodejing suggest? Metaphors are comparisons that add imagery and depth to abstract emotions, so think about the metaphor you’d like to use to describe life.
Many poems from the 18th-and 19th-centuries use the metaphor of changing seasons to describe the life cycle, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.”
Tip#3: Tell a story
It used to be true that some of the best poems about life posed a problem or a tension in the opening stanzas before presenting a conclusion or resolve in the closing stanzas or couplets, like many of the Shakespearian sonnets. However, as we move into more modern and post-modern poetry, this problem/solution structure isn’t as clear. Many contemporary poems about life remain unresolved, a testimony to the great question mark of life.
As life gets more messy and complicated, poetry loses it’s neat structure and predictable patterns come undone.
This being said, you can still tell a great story in the form and content of your poem. If you feel like life is simple and harmonious, then the diction and rhythm of your poem should reflect this; if you think that life is complicated and open-ended, then think about how you can capture this lyrically.
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