How to Write Without Caring About Trends
The poetry world loves a trend. Fragmented minimalism. Lush sprawling narratives. Confessional rawness. Hyper-formal revival. Each one arrives with its gatekeepers and its algorithms and its quiet implication that if you're not writing this way right now, you're writing wrong.
You're not writing wrong. You're just not writing for them.
Trends are a business decision dressed up as an aesthetic movement. They tell you what's selling, what's being shortlisted, what the right people are talking about at the right dinners. They have nothing to do with what needs to be said. And there is always something that needs to be said — something urgent, something specific, something that will not wait for the pendulum to swing back in its direction.
That's the thing about the poems that last. They weren't written for the moment. They were written despite it. Di Prima wrote Revolutionary Letters when nobody was asking for revolutionary letters. Baldwin wrote the essays when the audience wasn't ready. They wrote from urgency, not from trend, and the work survived everything that was fashionable the year it was made.
Your voice is not a trend. It's the thing underneath all the trends — the specific way you see, the specific things you've lived, the specific language that is yours and nobody else's. That doesn't go in and out of style. It either exists or it doesn't, and the only way it stops existing is if you sand it down to fit something it was never meant to be.
So here's the only advice that matters: write what you need to say. Not what's selling. Not what the algorithms are surfacing. What you need to say — the thing that's been sitting in your chest, the thing you keep circling back to, the thing that won't leave you alone until you put it into language.
That urgency is the poem. Everything else is packaging.
The audience you're looking for is not the audience that follows trends. It's the person who finds your work three years from now and feels, for the first time, that someone knew. That someone said it. That they are not alone in what they have seen and carried.
Write for that person. They're already waiting.
Sunday Mornings at the River is an independent working class project. There is no infrastructure behind it. No grant, no institution, no team. It runs on carer's wages and stubbornness. If anything here resonated — a line, an idea, a feeling you couldn't name before — please share it, comment, or pass it to someone who needs it. That's the only distribution we have. You are it. Thank you for being here.