How to Write Without Caring About Trends
I have sat in rooms where the wrong line got you laughed out of the group. Fragmented minimalism. Lush sprawling narrative. Confessional rawness, dragged raw enough to bleed on cue. Hyper-formal revival, all cufflinks and no pulse. Each one arrives wearing the costume of an aesthetic movement. Underneath it is a business decision. It always was.
You are not writing wrong. You are simply not writing for them.
Trends tell you what is selling this season, what is being shortlisted, who is being toasted at which dinner. They are gossip with better production values. 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 sit quietly and wait its turn for the pendulum to swing back its way.
That is the thing about the poems that last. They were not written for the moment. They were written despite it. Written when nobody was asking for them, when the room had already decided what it wanted, when the audience was somewhere else entirely, not ready, not listening. The work survived every fashion that was current the year it was made, because it was never in conversation with fashion. It was in conversation with what was true.
Your voice is not a trend. It is the thing underneath every trend that has ever passed through this world and every one that will come after. The specific way you see. The specific things you have carried and lived and lost. The specific language that is yours, that nobody else on this earth can lay claim to. That does not go in and out of style. It either exists or it does not, and the only way it stops existing is if you sand it down, plane it smooth, make it fit something it was never built to be.
So here is the only advice worth giving. Write what you need to say. Not what is selling. Not what the algorithm is feeding back to you like it knows you. What you need to say. The thing sitting in your chest since before you had the words for it. The thing you keep circling, keep almost writing, keep putting down and picking back up. The thing that will not leave you be until you have made language out of it.
That urgency is the poem. Everything else is packaging.
The reader you are writing for is not the one following trends. It is the one who finds the work three years from now, in a used bookshop or a dog-eared library copy or a photo someone posted online, and feels, for the first time, that someone knew. That someone said it plainly, out loud, in ink. That they are not the only one who has seen what they have seen and carried what they have carried.
Write for that reader. They are already waiting for you.
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.