Permission to Write Bad Poems

Let’s start with the obvious: you are going to write bad poems. Not just one or two, but a whole family of them. They’ll gather in your notebooks, sulk in your Google Drive, glare at you from the corner of your desk. And that’s fine. Necessary, even. A sign of life.

We live in a culture obsessed with polish: the perfect Instagram caption, the perfect line break, the perfect kitchen counter. But poetry is not granite worktops—it doesn’t need to gleam. It needs to breathe. Which means you’ll sometimes write lines that fall flat, metaphors that trip over their own shoelaces, stanzas that feel like they were scribbled by a caffeinated pigeon. This is not failure. This is practice.

Bad poems are compost. They break down, get messy, and—given time—become the soil out of which something green might grow. Every poet you admire has a drawer full of compost. The difference is, they didn’t let it rot them from the inside. They understood that writing badly is not the opposite of writing well; it is the road that leads you there.

Perfection is the great creativity-killer. It makes you cautious. It tells you to colour inside the lines, to write about daffodils only if you’re Wordsworth and to rhyme “love” with “dove” only if you’re drunk. But poetry, at its best, is unruly. It sneaks into alleyways, gets drunk at the wrong weddings, wears odd socks on purpose. When you give yourself permission to write badly, you’re giving yourself permission to be alive on the page.

Think of writing less as a performance and more as a practice. No one expects a violinist to play flawlessly the first time they pick up the bow, yet poets often expect their first draft to arrive fully dressed for the ball. Let your drafts come barefoot. Let them spill wine on the carpet. Editing will arrive later with a mop.

And here’s the secret: sometimes a bad poem has one line that sings. Just one. A flash in the rubble. That line can become the heart of something better. Which is why you don’t throw away your disasters. Keep them. They are archives of your becoming.

To write badly is also to be brave. You’re admitting you don’t have control, that you might look foolish, that your voice might shake. But that’s the same courage it takes to fall in love, to protest, to stand up in a meeting and say: actually, this isn’t working. Writing badly is an act of defiance against silence.

So yes, let yourself write messily. Write clichés, write too many adverbs, write the kind of line you’d never dare read aloud. There will be time later to sharpen, to prune, to make it elegant. For now, just write.

Because not every poem has to be good. It just has to exist. And sometimes, existence is radical enough.