Exploring your Emotions in Poetry

In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s Sarah Wardle on how to explore your emotions in poetry.

Writing can help us process feelings we don’t fully understand. How can writers start turning emotions into poetry without feeling overwhelmed?

By taking the rhythm of a poem they enjoy which they have been reading, whether one with a musical meter, or the speech rhythms of a free verse poem, and using it as a template for their work. There is something calming about getting the rhythm right which prevents one feeling overwhelmed.

In your course, you explore pairs of emotions like contentment and bereavement, hope, and despair. How can working with contrasting feelings deepen our writing?

Whether writing autobiographically, or using our imagination, or observation of others, it can deepen our work to show the good and the bad we all go through, the full range of human experience writers express and capture and for which readers read.

How can personifying emotions, or giving them a colour or place, help writers connect more vividly with their inner experiences?

I think associations we have with how we felt and what we observed in others can trigger more descriptions and memories to articulate, so we can write it out more fully and find some closure in doing so.

Writing about trauma or difficult emotions can be intense. What advice would you give for doing this safely while still being honest in the poem?

 I think a good poem is full of pared down words and aiming for conciseness and focusing on the making of a hopefully publishable poem, not ranting, for example, or getting bogged down in the despair of what actually happened, is something to aim for, even though it’s not always easy to do!

How can exploring emotions in first and third person help writers see themselves and others more clearly in their work?

It’s good to look outside of your own self and head to think about and record others and the world in the third person and it can give a healing distance from events to transfer one’s own experiences into the third person. On the other hand, the reader can be drawn in more by a lyric ‘I’ and a degree of supportive intimacy can be imagined by the writer, as if in conversation, by using the first person and an imagined reader.

Finally, what’s one simple prompt or exercise you’d give to someone who wants to start writing emotionally engaged poetry today?

I’d say walk around an art gallery or browse art online and when something truly grabs you, voice yourself as one of the characters in the painting as a dramatic monologue.

Sarah is running her course Exploring Emotion with us this Spring. This course is now sold out, but if you would like to be added to the waiting list, please contact [email protected]. Alternatively, you can find alternative courses available here.

Sarah Wardle has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing and has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books. She has won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and been shortlisted for a Forward Prize. She has published countless book reviews of others’ work. Her writing residencies have included Bedgebury National Pinetum, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, and Transport for London. She has taught in higher education and adult education for over 25 years.