Your first month of writing poetry
Most people who try poetry quit before the first poem is done. Here's what to actually expect, and what to do with the bad drafts that come first.
By Colin B. · Published June 6, 2026
Most people who try poetry approach it the wrong way: they wait for inspiration, then try to write something beautiful, then abandon it when it reads like a greeting card. That’s not how poetry works. That’s not how any writing works.
Here’s the reality: your first month of writing poetry is mostly about accumulating bad drafts. That’s the actual job. The good stuff comes later, and it comes because you did the work of filling pages with bad stuff first.
This is what the first month actually looks like.
Week one: Read before you write
The single best investment you can make before writing a word is to read poems. Not to analyze them, not to study them, just to read them and notice what happens.
Go to the Poetry Foundation’s website and read 20 poems over the course of a week. Don’t pick poems by subject; let the search randomize. You’ll find some that do nothing for you and some that stop you cold. Pay attention to the ones that stop you. Ask yourself: what just happened? Was it a line break? An image? A sound?
You don’t need to answer the question rigorously. You just need to start noticing.
One exercise that has worked for centuries: copy a poem you love by hand, word for word, punctuation and all. Not to plagiarize it, but to feel it differently. Copying a poem is different from reading it. Your hand follows the rhythm. You slow down enough to notice the choices.
After a week of this, you’ll have a better sense of what you’re drawn to than after a year of reading about poetry theory.
Week two: Write your first drafts
Pick a subject and write toward it. The subject doesn’t matter; pick one that’s been in your head lately. The goal of the first draft is to get something on paper, not to write a good poem.
Here’s the most important thing to understand about early drafts: they are not poems. They’re raw material. You’re not trying to produce a finished poem in a sitting; you’re trying to accumulate material you can work with.
A few starting points that tend to work well:
Describe one thing precisely. Not abstractly (“love is complicated”) but specifically (“the way she holds her coffee cup with both hands even when it’s too hot”). Specificity is the whole game in poetry. Abstract claims tell readers nothing. Specific images let readers see.
Write toward a memory. Not a meaningful one necessarily; a small one. The smell of something. A sound from childhood. Something you saw last week on the street. The smaller and more specific the memory, the better. Grand memories tend to produce grand rhetoric, which is the enemy of good poems.
Try a haiku. Five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. The constraint is not the point; the constraint forces you to choose one image and make it do all the work. This is good practice for longer forms.
Write every day this week. Even if it’s just three lines. Even if they’re bad. Especially if they’re bad. The goal is to prove to yourself that you can write something, then do it again.
Week three: Revise one poem
Pick one poem from last week’s drafts. Not the best one; pick the one that interests you most, or the one you can’t quite figure out.
Read it aloud. This is not optional. Poems live in the ear. The moment you read your poem aloud, you’ll hear everything that doesn’t work: the line that stumbles, the word that’s almost right but isn’t, the place where the rhythm collapses.
Now make one change. Just one. Not a complete rewrite; choose one thing to improve. Maybe the last line is soft and you need to cut it. Maybe there’s a word that’s doing the wrong thing (“beautiful” almost always is). Make that one change and read it aloud again.
Repeat until it sounds right.
This is revision. Most beginning poets avoid it because they think it means the original draft was bad. It doesn’t. It means you have material to work with.
A few revision questions that help:
- Is the first line doing enough work? The first line is the hardest to write and the most important to get right. It sets the whole poem’s pitch.
- Does every line earn its place? If you can remove a line and the poem is stronger, remove it.
- What’s the poem actually about? Not its subject, its meaning. Sometimes the poem you thought you were writing isn’t the poem you wrote. Follow the better one.
Week four: Read what you’ve written
By the end of the month, you should have 10-15 drafts, one or two of which have been revised at least once. Read through all of them.
Notice patterns. Do you keep returning to the same subjects? Do your poems tend to end on images or on statements? Are your lines long or short by instinct? None of these are right or wrong. They’re your tendencies, and knowing them helps you write toward them or deliberately against them.
You are not a bad poet because your first month of poems isn’t publishable. Every working poet has a drawer full of drafts that never went anywhere. That drawer is how they learned. Fill yours.
A few things that will change your slope of improvement dramatically:
Find other readers. Not family. Find someone who reads poetry seriously and ask if they’d look at one poem. The right reader can see things you can’t. One sharp reader is worth a hundred workshop participants who’ll tell you it’s “really good.”
Read the craft book. Stephen Fry’s guide will tell you what you’ve been doing intuitively and give you more tools. Read it alongside your drafts, not instead of them.
Give yourself at least six months. Poetry takes longer than almost any other writing discipline to feel natural. The poets who persist are not more talented than the ones who quit; they simply sat with the discomfort longer.
Ready to set up your writing practice with the right tools? See the poetry writing gear guide for the notebooks, pens, and books worth buying first.