Why Write a Poem or a Song?
Part 2 of The Art of Speaking, a free 12-part speech arts series on poetry from The Woodlands Conservatory of Music.
In our last post, we called every poem a love affair between the heart and the mind. Today I want to carry that idea one step further, into the moment just before you write.
Here is the simplest way I know to say it: lead with the mind and write from the heart, or lead with the heart and write with the mind. The order matters less than the partnership.
The mind holds the pen steady; the heart decides what the pen is for. Neither one does its best work alone. Like two hands at the piano, they play different parts of the same piece, and the music only happens when they move together.
Before we pick up the pen, though, there is a question we need to sit with for a while.
Why do you want to write?
It sounds like an easy question. It is not. Most of us have never stopped long enough to answer it honestly.
So don't rush it. Sit with it the way you would sit with a piece of music before you play it: listening, noticing, letting it settle. Your answer will shape every poem you write, whether you name it or not. A poet who knows why they write can find their way back to the page on the hard days. A poet who doesn't will drift toward whatever reward is nearest.
Good reasons that can pull you off course
When I ask students why they want to write, I usually hear some version of these:
To finish a poem. There is real joy in completing something.
To see it in print. A published poem feels like proof that it mattered.
To hear what someone thinks. A kind comment can keep you going for weeks.
Each of these is reasonable. Each one is also a kind of fuel, and we all need fuel for this slow, honest work.
But here is the catch. Each of these goals can quietly compete with the deeper one. If finishing is the goal, you stop revising too soon. If print is the goal, you start writing what you think editors want. If praise is the goal, you soften the lines that might make someone uncomfortable, often the very lines that make the poem true. The rewards are fine as side effects. They make poor compasses.
The real ambition
Under all those reasons sits a bigger one. Every poet, whether they admit it or not, wants to write as well as the poets who first made them fall in love with poetry. Keats. Yeats. William Carlos Williams. Whoever it was for you.
Think about what those poets actually left us. Often it is only a few lines, set down on a page, that carry so much force that a reader feels them once and never forgets them. That is the target. Not a shelf of books. Not a following. A handful of lines that live in someone else's memory long after they close the page.
That ambition is the north star. Everything else (finishing, publishing, applause) is the weather along the way. Enjoy the sunshine when it comes, but steer by the star.
What is good writing, anyway?
Is good writing objective or subjective? The honest answer is both.
There is an objective side, and that belongs to the mind. Rhythm either carries the line or it stumbles. An image is either precise or vague. A line break either earns its pause or wastes it. These things can be learned, practiced, and checked, the same way we check intonation or timing in a music lesson.
Then there is the subjective side, and that belongs to the heart. Keats is Keats because he wrote as Keats. Yeats is Yeats because he wrote as Yeats. Williams is Williams because he wrote as Williams. None of them sounds like the others, and none of them was trying to.
The same will be true of you. You will become you as a poet because you write as you. Craft gives you the tools. Your own voice decides what to build with them.
A river of many voices
In the last post, I described poetry as a river that many voices travel. I want to look at that river a little more closely, because it behaves a lot like physics.
Picture each poem as a wave moving downstream: rising, falling, carried by the current of its own time. Now picture thousands of those waves moving together. When two waves meet, they interfere. Where their crests line up, they amplify each other, and the sound grows louder. Where a crest meets a trough, they cancel, and the water goes quiet. Some waves even run in opposite directions, pushing against the current.
Poetry works the same way. A poem written today meets a poem written two hundred years ago. Sometimes they reinforce each other, and an old idea rings out with new force. Sometimes they push against each other, and the tension is exactly what makes the new poem interesting.
Here is the part I love: you get to decide the resonance. You choose which voices to tune to, which to answer, and which to push against. And those voices will feel different to you over time. A poem that left you cold at twenty may stop your breath at forty. The river keeps moving, and so do you.
What never changes
Styles come and go. Forms fall in and out of fashion. But three things have stayed constant for as long as people have made poems:
The desire to write one. Something in us keeps reaching for words that hold more than ordinary speech can.
The world's willingness to receive it. People still stop for a poem at a wedding, a funeral, a graduation, a quiet night alone.
The world's need for it. When plain language runs out, we still turn to poetry.
Those three will not pass away. And when a poem truly works, it is more than a personal accomplishment. It lifts the reader, even briefly, out of the busy, fragile world we live in and lets them glimpse something larger and more lasting. That is a gift worth getting ready for.
Mapping the edges of who you are
So why do we write? In the end, I think we write poems to explore the edges of ourselves.
Think of yourself as a map with the borders still unfinished. Each poem is a trip to the coastline, a chance to sketch in a little more of the shore. Or think of a piano with eighty-eight keys, when most days we only play the middle octave. A poem sends your hand to the far ends of the keyboard, to the notes you didn't know you had. Or think of a lantern carried into a room you have walked past for years but never entered.
However you picture it, the work is the same: going a little further than you have gone before, and bringing back something true. That is why we lead with the mind, so we can travel well. And that is why we write from the heart, so the journey means something when we return.
Try this before the next post
Set a timer for ten minutes. At the top of a page, write: Why do I want to write? Answer without stopping or editing.
Read what you wrote. Circle every reason that depends on someone else (print, praise, approval). Underline every reason that belongs only to you.
Name one poet whose lines you have never forgotten. Copy out one line from their work by hand, and write a sentence about why it stayed with you.
Finish with one sentence of your own that begins: I write because… Keep it somewhere you will see it.
See you in the next part of The Art of Speaking.
— The Woodlands Conservatory of Music
