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My friends, it’s the end of the year, winter has its soft paws in our souls, and we’re all—in some small or large capacity—about to have a change of pace for the next little while before we greet 2026 (in terror or a flurry of excitement…that I leave up to you!).
All in all, it’s a good time to write and an even better time to write more. If you’re a poet or dabble in poetry, perhaps you might naturally gravitate towards slower poems right now, akin to contemplations or prayers. Slow doesn’t always mean sad, of course, and sad isn’t necessarily even tragic. In anycase, poetry in and of itself has some kinda magic that wrenches out the saddest songs from our hearts and forces us to somehow try and commit them to paper (or, you know, the screen).
Now, you might be writing more journalistically (as in, poetry is a way to beautify the diary entry for you), and I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, if that is primarily the case, this post/email probably isn’t for you. You may even be offended by it. For that, I sincerely apologize in advance.
If, however, you—like me—enjoy critique, revision, and have a desire to publish your poetry, then below, I’ve share some observations to help you avoid certain pitfalls that can come with, what I’ll simply call (and hope for you to understand in all its glory and variegatedness) the Sad Poem.
First, though, some examples of some of the best sad poems I know.:
Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert
Elm by Sylvia Plath
[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] by Alejandra Pizarnik
Gently, Gently by Bert Meyers
As Ever by Agha Shahid Ali
And now, in connection with the poems I shared above, some observations, organized best I can, to help you stop writing bad sad poems, and…start writing good ones.
On repetition and form as containers for grief
Karan’s ghazal ends every couplet with “god,” creating this incantatory rhythm where the word becomes more complicated each time it appears—blessing, question, threat, absence, and so on. Agha Shahid Ali (my most favorite poet) does something similar in “As Ever,” where the ghazal form holds the desperation:
So I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain. Return, if it is just to leave me again. ... An era’s passed since the luxury of tears– Make me weep, Consoler, let blood know its rain.
Pizarnik repeats “All night” until it becomes a kind of madness:
All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me. All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.
That repetition mirrors the very human experience of insomnia and obsession.
Bob Hicok uses anaphora too: “When the wind died...When the maple tree died...When the roses died...When the child died.” Each “when” is a small funeral, and the structure lets him build to that devastating final line about calling the dead even though “The dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of.”
On getting weird with your sadness
Plath’s “Elm” never once says “I’m sad” or “I’m depressed.” Instead the speaker is a tree, or maybe possessed by a tree, and the imagery gets visceral and strange: My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires” / “I am inhabited by a cry.” That’s so much more unsettling than any direct statement of pain could be.
Pizarnik gives us “feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.” Anatomically impossible yet emotionally nothing could be more honest in that space. Likewise, Bert Meyers writes:
And you, mad as a clarinet where the street divides; a city of raindrops in a bush; the slow honey that drips from the sky’s old ladle…
See how the surreal blends and folds and opens up. As when Hicok writes “the father dug a hole in his thigh / and got in,” — the surreal folds right back into the self, the physical, the tangible, and for a moment they are one.
On the physical manifestations of grief
Bad sad poems work mainly with the psychological (without much depth and mostly through cliché) . Good ones can be felt in the body. They yank you into their world. Note in Karan’s Ghazal for Dida: “You blew on the first morsel, then offered each idol” / “she weighs the beads of her rosary to seduce god.” Those are hands doing specific things, rituals you can picture…enact…be possessed by as you read.
Agha Shahid Ali: “Shouting your name till the last car had disappeared, / how I ran on the platform after your train.” Here’s an action anyone who’s been left can see themselves doing. Or “To find her, ‘round phantom-wrists I glue bangles”… the physical is invaded by the psychological, and in that act there is horror…because grief inevitably leads to some form of horror, terror, dread.
And see Meyers, here:
At night, I was the one who became a cello, strung with all our roads, where memory hums to itself like a tire.
He’s not saying “I wept from sadness because of stuff I remembered,” but rather gives us the metaphor of becoming an instrument, the image of memory as a humming distended tire.
And of course, Jack Gilbert’s poem in its entirety is sadness made physical. “Michiko Dead” is about carrying a box that’s too heavy, adjusting one’s grip as different muscles tire. He never says “grief” or “I miss her.” Instead, he describes arms underneath, thumbs shifting, blood draining from a raised arm, going numb, finding a way to keep carrying without ever putting it down. Fucking brilliant piece of writing, man.
On sound and music and pain
Bad sad songs often make me cry if I’m in a crying mood. Bad sad poems make me mad, often. Music has the boon of, well, music…whereas poetry’s just got words.
Notice Pizarnik’s syntax, how it gets tangled and frantic:
All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.
Please, read it aloud, and feel it for yourself, the painful music in the language, the sobbing, ringing loud and clear.
Or dear Sylvia here:
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.
Those hard consonants, that repetition of “echoing.” The sound…harsh and relentless.
Meyers uses music explicitly—cello, clarinet, tuning fork—but he also makes the poem itself musical:
Gently, gently, through anger and pain, love justified itself, like the nails in the house during a storm.
Feel that softness in the repetition against the hardness of what he’s describing?
On refusal to comfort
None of these poems offer resolution. Plath ends with the tree/speaker still “inhabited by a cry” that “flaps out / Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.” That’s terrifying, not comforting.
Pizarnik: “All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.”
Karan Kapoor: “Your name is her offering, Karan. The day she dies / you will lose your name, and you will lose god.” The poem doesn’t say “but then I found meaning” or “but love remains.” It ends with that double loss.
These poets trust readers to sit with discomfort, weep, be transformed, mourn, linger on the page…live with the grief and let it leave you silently, perhaps when you’re least expecting it to.
On beginnings
I’ll end with this one. Just look at this utterly heartwrenching yet beautifully simple opening from Bert Meyer's “Gently, Gently”:
We, too, began with joy. Then, sickness came; then, poverty. We were poor, so poor, our children were our only friends.
I wish more poems started like this. Not just the sad ones, all of them, happy ones, weird ones, funny ones. So damn simple, yet so transcendental. My whole being feels these opening lines…I want to hug the poet, I want to love the world, I want to hold my daughter forever.
This is such an excellent compilation. Thank you! Loved reading it.
This had some great insights and now I need to start writing again✍️ 🏃♂️