In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 228.
At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, my students often ask me: How can you tell when you’re ready to engage with trauma in a poem? Many of them have stories of pain they want to tell. Sexual assaults. Abusive families. The wounds of exile and displacement. Sometimes, they’ve come to poetry because they sense it’s the genre in which they’ll finally find a language for their trauma.
When they ask me this question, I have three simple questions that I encourage them to ask of themselves in turn, three ways of determining if their poems are prepared to serve as containers for extreme harm.
The first is bodily. Does the process of drafting a poem about the trauma induce severe, physical discomfort? If attempts to narrate or represent the pain elicit symptoms such as shortness of breath, heart palpitations, or a cold sweat, then it may be too soon for you to connect with the experience through verse. Sometimes when we write about past trauma, we re-enter the sadness of that time. We can become like the “many human ears” in Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel.” Writing about trauma is like Forché’s “dried peach halves” dropped into a glass of water; the pain rehydrates the writer, saturating the poet with fresh memories of despondency, confusion, or anger. When we have done the necessary therapeutic work, these emotions remain manageable, and well-made art is still possible. But if the poet hasn’t yet received sufficient treatment, then the physiological response to reiterating the trauma may feel overwhelming and, ultimately, can govern the choices we try to make on the page.
The second test is one of craft. As you work on the poem, are you able to accept that trauma—thanks to the relationship between form and content—will challenge your approach to narrative, how you wield diction, the way you play with sound, the argument you make, and your handling of the figurative? For instance, an effective metaphor demands a lot of the poet’s intellect. It must support the poem’s rhetoric. It must cohere. I think of A.E. Stallings’s exquisite sonnet, “Sina Qua Non,” in which the speaker mourns the death of a father. It’s a devastating loss, as the poem’s brilliant use of metaphor demonstrates. Stallings gives us a sequence of examples, including “the gap of a dropped stitch,” “the needle’s eye / Weeping its black thread,” and “the interstice of lace,” each one an effort to express the unbearable presence of absence. The poem also navigates its formal constraints—the rhyme, the meter, the reader’s expectation of volta—with great dexterity. “Sina Qua Non” is a powerful meditation on trauma, precisely because Stallings has such command of her métier.
The word metaphor comes from the Greek, meaning “a transfer” or “carrying over.” So often when I’m teaching my students how to engage with trauma in their poems, I’m offering them ways to trick themselves into approaching this subject matter. Tricks are necessary because trauma, by definition, is scary. We recognize its electricity and are afraid to get too close. Metaphors allows us to transfer the menace of trauma onto objects that are separate and lie beyond us.
But, if the trauma is too fresh, the metaphors tend to falter or wilt beneath the pressure of emotion. An extended metaphor or a heroic simile puts even greater pressure on the poet. Poetic craft is a kind of carnival act, like juggling six chainsaws or walking on tiptoe across a slender wire. The circus performer must be calm, focused. Yes, the show should feel dangerous to the audience. But the juggler, the acrobat—these people know that the sensation of risk is an impression they’re creating. So too with the poem of trauma. Using craft, the poet may put the reader inside the experience of the traumatized mind, as Paul Celan does in his masterpiece of trauma, “Todesfuge.” But this is only an effect. In fact, the poet determines every move the poem makes. We need only look at a poem like Robert’s Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” with its terrible refrain, “voyage through death / to life upon these shores,” to recognize the control the poet must exert over his words.
Frankly, the third test is a matter of craft as well. Once you have a full draft, are you able to revise the poem, making choices for the sake of the text as a work of art? We all find revision difficult, regardless of our subject matter. But when a poem engages with trauma, revision can seem almost impossible. A writer who hasn’t fully prepared for the rigors of the process will struggle to detach enough to move beyond editing into the cold, disruptive labor of revision.
Of course, a poem can have a purely therapeutic function. If writing a poem helps you to recover from trauma, then it has done something important. But if your goal is to share art with a wider audience, then the text must bend to your intentions. I’m not advocating for poems that are prescriptive or that reject intuition, the creative impulses of the subconscious. I’m saying that—when it comes to their drafting and revision—poems of trauma resemble other poems. They need our critical distance. They need us to admit: This cherished phrase is self-indulgent. This image is weak. This idea is a cliché. Above all, poems of trauma require our ruthlessness.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction and ten poetry collections, including most recently Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2025. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.
image credit: Elena Mozhvilo