Why We Need More Bad Poetry (Yes, Really)

Here's what I learned after years of reading only the "good" poems—the ones in anthologies, the award winners, the ones your English teacher marked up with a red pen: I had forgotten why anyone writes poetry in the first place.

We have this idea that poetry is a high-stakes art form. You sit down with your pen like a surgeon picking up a scalpel. Every word must earn its place. Every line must shimmer with meaning. One clumsy verb and the whole thing collapses into embarrassment. So most people never write a poem at all. They're too afraid of producing something "bad."

But here's the thing: bad poetry is where poetry lives.

I don't mean technically incompetent poetry—I mean poems that are rough, ungainly, sincere in ways that make you cringe. Poems written by people who are still figuring out what they think. Poems that break their own rules. Poems written because something needed to get out of your chest and onto the page RIGHT NOW, not because you were chasing publication or a byline.

Think about what actually happens when you write a poem. You're not making a product. You're doing something closer to thinking out loud, except the thinking gets strange and compressed and suddenly says things you didn't know you knew. That's the utility of poetry—not as entertainment or decoration, but as a tool for figuring yourself out. A way of making sense of things that prose can't quite reach.

The poems that feel most alive to me aren't always the most technically skilled. They're the ones that feel like someone just captured a thought before it scattered. The ones with awkward line breaks that somehow work. The ones that reach for something and just barely miss, but the reaching itself is what matters.

We've built this cult of the perfect poem—Instagram poetry, quote-worthy lines, the kind of thing you screenshot. And meanwhile, the actual magic of poetry, which is just someone trying to say something true and strange on the page, has become invisible.

So here's my suggestion: write a bad poem today. Write something unpolished. Write something that would make you nervous to show anyone. Write something where you're not trying to impress—you're just trying to understand. The beauty of poetry isn't that it's perfect. The beauty is that it's honest, and honest is almost always awkward at first.

The world has plenty of polished poems already. What it needs more of is the sound of real people thinking on the page.