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How To Write a Poem About Hate
And once it’s on the page, you can burn it if you want to
Oooh, this is tricky. Why would you want to write a poem about hate? Isn’t there enough hate in the world already, without adding a poem to the morass?
True. But there are a lot of reasons why you might. One of those reasons is that most of us don’t like to feel real hatred. It’s a powerful, negative emotion that can lead to disaster. It can lead to actions you later regret. Worse, it can lead to nothing and sit inside you and fester.
And what about other people’s hate? Isn’t it enough to see it on the news and in the many media we consume? Why take it on at all?
Because we all know, if we’ve been writing poems for a while, that writing about something in a poem can have positive effects. Firstly, it can be like lancing a boil and releasing a huge amount of horrible stuff you were feeling. Getting it out on the page is — yes — therapeutic. Like getting any big emotion out onto the page, it’s a way of releasing it from yourself: mentally, physically and emotionally.
If it’s other people’s hate, writing a poem can help you to distance yourself from it, or to simply understand it better and then be able to move away from it. When we understand something’s origins and behaviors, it has less power…
