Creating Without Witnesses: The Quiet Joy of Poetry

There is a strange, almost illicit freedom in creating without witnesses. No audience warming up in the wings, no metrics twitching in the background, no quiet pressure to be seen performing yourself into coherence. Just the work, unobserved. Creation stripped of its costume.

Poetry has always known this. It does not need spectators to exist. It asks for something quieter and more demanding: honesty. The kind that shows up when no one is watching, when a single line opens like a fault line and you follow it down, not knowing where you will land.

Running a poetry press complicates this. The work becomes visible before it is ready to be tender. There is packaging, positioning, timing, optimisation. Poems are asked to behave nicely in an economy that prefers content over attention, output over presence. Over time, you can feel the centre of gravity shift — away from listening inward, toward producing outward.

Stepping back has been less about disappearing and more about remembering. Remembering that I did not fall in love with poetry because it performed well. I fell in love with the slowness of it. The way it resists efficiency. The way it refuses to hurry into coherence.

Poetry is not a product first. It is a private negotiation with language. A way of sitting with what does not resolve easily. A place to put the things that do not fit into captions, campaigns, or neatly framed narratives about growth.

When you create without witnesses, you give yourself back your own tempo. You let a line be clumsy. You let a draft be unshareable. You stop polishing for the room and start listening for the sentence that tells the truth, even if it is inconvenient, even if it is not very likeable.

This is not an argument against sharing work. Poetry is meant to travel. It moves between people. It unsettles, opens, connects. But its force does not come from being seen. It comes from being honest before it is legible, before it is shaped for reception.

If you are tired of being visible, tired of performing coherence for a feed, you are not failing. You are responding to saturation. Try making something that does not need to be witnessed to be real. Let the work belong to you first. Let it be incomplete. Let it be yours.

The audience may come. It may not. Neither outcome is a verdict on the work itself. What matters is whether you are still in conversation with the part of you that writes when no one is watching.