Aug 25, 2026 · 47 min · 13 segments
How can staying curious, practising deep reading, and ‘starting with a word’ pull you out of a creative rut and transform your manuscript? In this episode of *The Write Club Podcast*, we spend 50…
Marilyn McIntyreGuestBethHostMaryHost
It's probably different where you live, but there's a lot of poetry out there.
You can't make a living writing poetry, and I-- But I remember starting th- an undergraduate course I was teaching with the question, why read a poem at a time like this? Which is a pretty good question right now.
And the very first answer was from this woman in the, way in the back row.
She waved her hand around and she said, "Poetry saved my life." And she had a story to tell about that.
But then two or three other people spoke about moments when a particular poem had addressed them in a way that they hadn't encountered before.
And so we moved from there into talking about what poetry as such does that prose doesn't, or the poetic dimension of language, because poetry and prose are not that simply separable.
But it was invigorating to hear that from the students themselves, that there's something life-giving and sometimes life-saving about a poem that makes certain demands of you because of the, the nature of poetry, which is that it disrupts ordinary syntax enough so that you pause in different places and have little shocks of recognition that wake you up.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's probably different where you live, but there's a lot of poetry out there.
You can't make a living writing poetry, and I-- But I remember starting th- an undergraduate course I was teaching with the question, why read a poem at a time like this? Which is a pretty good question right now.
And the very first answer was from this woman in the, way in the back row.
She waved her hand around and she said, "Poetry saved my life." And she had a story to tell about that.
But then two or three other people spoke about moments when a particular poem had addressed them in a way that they hadn't encountered before.
And so we moved from there into talking about what poetry as such does that prose doesn't, or the poetic dimension of language, because poetry and prose are not that simply separable.
But it was invigorating to hear that from the students themselves, that there's something life-giving and sometimes life-saving about a poem that makes certain demands of you because of the, the nature of poetry, which is that it disrupts ordinary syntax enough so that you pause in different places and have little shocks of recognition that wake you up.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
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