How to write a poem

To write a poem, start with one real thing you noticed and not with a big idea: an object, a moment, a sentence someone said. Write down what you can see, hear and touch about it in plain words, break it into lines where you would pause, and cut everything that explains. Then read it aloud and change whatever your voice trips on. A poem does not have to rhyme, and it does not have to be long.

Start with a thing, not a feeling

"Love" and "grief" are too big to write about directly. Every poem about them sounds the same. So pick the small thing that carries the feeling: the coat still on the hook, the voicemail you have not deleted, the way he salts food before tasting it.

Good places to start:

• an object that belonged to someone;
• a place at a particular hour;
• a sentence somebody said that you cannot forget;
• something you do every day without thinking;
• a question you cannot answer.

If you can point a camera at it, it will probably work.

Six steps

1. Write without stopping for five minutes. About the thing, in sentences, no lines yet. Do not judge any of it.
2. Underline what is concrete. Anything you could photograph, hear, smell or pick up. Leave the rest.
3. Put those pieces in an order. A common one: what you see first, then a closer look, then a turn, where the poem notices something it did not know at the start.
4. Break it into lines. See the next section.
5. Cut. The first line and the last line are often the ones to go. So is any line that says what the poem means.
6. Read it aloud and fix it by ear. Your ear catches what your eye lets through.

Where to break the lines

A line break is a small pause. It puts weight on the last word of one line and the first word of the next. That is the main tool a poem has that a paragraph does not.

• Break on a strong word, a noun or a verb, and not on "the" or "of".
• Short lines slow the reader down. Long lines hurry them along.
• A break can hold something back for half a second.

My father kept every key
he was ever given,
and not one of them
opens anything now.

Read it as a sentence and it is a plain remark. Broken like this, "every key" lands first, and the last line gets the room it needs. Nothing in it is a poetic word.

Rhyme, rhythm and sound

Rhyme is a choice. If you use it, the test is whether the rhyme chose the word for you. "I walked along beside the sea, as happy as a man can be" is there because of "sea", and the reader can tell.

Things to try before full rhyme:

• Half-rhyme. Words that nearly chime: bridge and grudge, home and come. It sounds less like a greeting card.
• Repeated sounds. A run of the same consonant or vowel inside the lines, as in "salt on the slipway, slick as glass".
• A repeated line. Bring one line back at the end, changed by what came between.

For rhythm, you do not need a formal metre. Read the poem aloud and tap the beats. Where you stumble, move a word or drop a syllable.

Before and after

A first attempt, all feeling and no thing:

I miss you so much since you went away,
my heart feels empty every day.

The same feeling, started from an object:

Your mug is still at the back of the cupboard.
I wash it on Sundays,
though nobody has used it.

The second never says "miss" or "heart". The mug does the work, and the reader does the feeling. That is most of what people mean by "show, don't tell".

Forms to try

You do not need a form, but a set of rules can make starting easier.

If you want to see a form filled in before you try it, the haiku generator and the sonnet generator each write one from your subject.

What to avoid

• Abstract words. Love, soul, sorrow, eternity. Swap each for something you can see.
• Worn images. Hearts, stars, tears like rain, a candle in the dark.
• Twisting the sentence to land a rhyme. "To the shore did I go" is not how anyone talks.
• Old poetic words. Thee, o'er, 'tis, unless you are joking.
• Explaining the ending. If the last line tells the reader what to feel, stop one line earlier.
• Too many adjectives. One exact noun beats three describing words.

Using AI without losing the poem

An AI is good at the mechanical parts of a poem. It will find you ten rhymes for a hard word, offer alternatives for a flat verb, keep a rhythm steady, or fill a form so you can see how it is built. It is bad at the part that matters, because it does not know your thing. Left alone it writes the average poem about the average mother.

So do your five minutes of writing first, and keep the list of concrete details. Then:

• give those details to the poem generator, or the love poem generator if it is for a partner, and treat what comes back as a draft to pull apart;
• ask it to be an editor: "which line is weakest, and why?";
• ask for options on one line only, and keep your own if yours is better.

Hemmingway writes best in English, and for a long, ambitious poem a larger model may do better. Whatever it gives you, read it aloud and change it until it sounds like you. How to write a poem with an AI poem writer covers what to tell it in more detail.

Try HemmingwayDownload the app

Common questions

How do you start writing a poem?

Pick one real thing: an object, a place or something someone said. Write about it without stopping for five minutes, underline the parts you could see or hear, and build the poem from those.

Does a poem have to rhyme?

No. Much modern poetry does not rhyme at all. Rhyme suits light and funny poems, and free verse often suits serious ones, because a forced rhyme can make a sincere line sound silly.

How long should a poem be?

As long as it takes to say one thing well. Four lines can be a whole poem. If you are starting out, aim for under twenty lines and cut from there.

What makes a poem good?

Specific details, plain words, and an ending that trusts the reader. A good poem shows you something you could see or hear and leaves the feeling to you.

How do I write a poem about someone?

Write down two or three things only that person does or says, and build the poem from those and not from words like "kind" or "special". Writing to them as "you" usually sounds warmer than writing about them.

Can I use AI to help write a poem?

Yes, for the mechanical parts: rhymes, rhythm, a draft to react to. Give it your own details and edit what comes back, because without them it writes a poem that could be about anyone.