How to Balance Humor With Anxiety and/or Grief In Poetry

If you would have told me two years ago that I’d be a published poet in 2024, I would have laughed in your face and then curled back into the daily despair I was living in at the time. But here we are, a few short weeks after the release of my debut poetry collection, Clumsy Beauty . ( How Poetry Saved My Life .) My writing journey began during that very difficult period in my life; I was desperate to start a “healthy habit” because I knew how easy it would have been for me to fall into a slew of not-so-healthy ones. While a normal person would have made an appointment with a therapist, I decided to open an Instagram account where, through creative writing/poetry, I began to conduct my own deep dive into myself and the emotions I was clawing my way through. As you can imagine, the near constant “ick” spewing out of me felt good to get out on to the page, but I knew it may have been overwhelming for a reader (just ask my husband). Using big feelings in our work can often be an alluring and relatable component to a piece but it comes with challenges. Writing about darker feelings can be a little like painting with watercolors—before you know it, they’re everywhere. So, in an effort to avoid getting stuck in the labyrinth of my own grief, anxiety, rage, etc., I learned to employ a few tricks to help me effectively illustrate my emotions without letting them turn into quicksand for the reader. I hope some of them will be helpful for you, too. Emotions: Use Em While Ya Got Em Pull the car over if you need to. There’s no substitute for a fresh feeling, because your body gets involved. I have described shaking, sweating, writhing, heaving while experiencing these things. Write it down while you are “in it.” Now here’s the trick—walk away! Put it down and come back later. I have found that my visceral, in the moment descriptions of emotions are priceless but then when I […]

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