When Bad Poetry Is the Least Performative Thing Left

Advice to lower your standards usually arrives as consolation. The work does not have to be good, you are told, which sounds like a kindness extended to beginners on their way to becoming less bad. Bad poetry runs on a different premise. The low bar is there because a high one stops you writing at all.

The term belongs to Margaret Bryden, a therapist who works in private practice and in psychiatric hospital settings, and it organizes her forthcoming book, "How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health and Resilience". Her definition skips craft entirely. "A bad poet is somebody who values honesty and curiosity," she says. "A bad poet is somebody who knows that when something is worth doing, it’s worth doing imperfectly." Nothing in there about meter or line breaks.

Her own way in was unglamorous: "by writing poetry and realizing I was bad at it and doing it anyway." Earlier in life the form had put her off, intimidating enough to make her feel she was missing whatever everyone else could see, so she set it aside for years. What changed was not her ability. Once she was practicing as a therapist she found a use for it, in her work and in the research she was reading.

The book carries the same logic into its own shape. "I would definitely say this is not a perfect book. Purposely so." The aim was to skip the textbook version and hand people the thing itself, with the frameworks she uses as a clinician built into the poems rather than explained around them. Her full account is in Episode 51 of the Mental Fitness Podcast.

Perfectionism is a way to avoid

Bryden’s read on perfectionism is that it is not really about your flaws at all. "It’s a way to avoid," she says. Whatever feels too painful or too big to face directly, the endless nitpicking gives your attention somewhere safer to live. Her summary: "So if you’re trying to really avoid something, be a perfectionist." (We have written separately on where perfectionism parts ways with high standards.)

The pressure is not specific to writing. "It comes up in everything and it’s everywhere in our lives too," Bryden says. "If you think about social media, if you think about the expectations that are put on parents, if you think about work responsibilities, there’s a lot of pressure that we feel to meet a very high standard."

Her examples are not all about writing, but the mechanism carries over to it. The work message, the post, the note to your kid’s teacher: each one gets judged on how well it is done, and you know that before you write a word. Writing to that is performing. What bad poetry does is swap the bar rather than remove it. Craft comes out, and her own definition names what goes in: honesty and curiosity. Almost everything else you write this week will be measured on how good it is. The bad poem is the one thing measured only on whether you told the truth.

Which is why the low bar is doing the actual work here. A blank page with a craft standard attached becomes one more surface for the avoidance to operate on. You can spend an hour picking the right first line and never write a second one. A page where bad output is the expected output has nothing left to perform for, and what surfaces on it tends to be closer to what you actually meant.

Metaphor gives you language for something amorphous

Putting a hard experience into prose does its own work, and that is the subject of our companion piece on what happens when you put hard experiences into words. Poetry leans on a move that plain description does not require.

"When you’re using a metaphor, you’re taking a set of data and information that you actually understand quite well and you know the variables about it and how it works," she says, "and you’re taking that structure and you’re overlapping it on top of something that you really don’t understand very well right now."

What you get is a translation. Something with no shape borrows the shape of something you have already mapped. "It gives you language to talk about it and it gives you imagery for you to overlay onto that," she says. "Now you understand it, whereas before maybe it was very abstract and amorphous."

Watch it work on a hard problem. For what to aim at instead, given that chasing happiness directly tends to backfire, she reaches for a car. The gas going into the tank of your life is meaning and relationships, plus whatever you are genuinely curious about. Happiness comes out the tailpipe. Stand behind the car staring at the exhaust and you are inhaling fumes instead of driving anywhere.

No literature degree is required to run that operation. And the choosing itself is part of the benefit, since deciding which structure to lay over the unmapped thing means trying several angles on it. Bryden calls that capacity psychological flexibility. She points to research behind the whole set of mechanisms she describes without naming particular studies, so treat it as her clinical read rather than a citation.

Poems are allowed to be ambiguous

You cannot tell which of her poems are about her, and she will not say. "There are lots of poems that are 100% about me, but there also are a lot of poems that are actually more about what I see as a clinician and what I experience with a lot of clients," she says. "And I still write from the first person perspective. So it’s actually a little bit ambiguous when you read through all these poems, it’s like, is this her or is this someone else? Let it be ambiguous."

She writes all of them in first person whether they came from her life or from her clinical work, and her instruction to a reader trying to work out which is which is to stop. That tolerance is useful, because the honest version of a hard experience is often unresolved. Two opposite things are true at once, and you do not yet know what any of it meant.

The poem works as a container instead, a vase or a cage in Bryden’s picture of it, something you can put a thing into and leave there. Turbulent feelings behave like a wild animal loose inside a person, and putting structure around them cages the animal. "A poem can just contain a lot of different things like contradictions, ambiguity, the unknown, a lot of pain, and it can transform them into art and into something that’s really benign," she says. "I’ve never heard of a poem hurting anybody."

Say it out loud

"Reading poetry out loud, I feel it really makes it come alive," Bryden says. "It’s very different. It’s a different experience." Her explanation is that your voice infuses the words with intonation and emotion, which helps you see the thing from a different perspective than the one you had while writing it.

Reading it to another person is a different act again, and she does not pretend it is comfortable. "It’s very terrifying," she says, because once the poem is out in the world "it is open to other people’s interpretation and however they want to receive it." It is also where Bryden locates belonging. A line lands on something the listener has also felt, and they feel seen by it. Vulnerability channeled into an art form becomes something another person can resonate with, and the resonance is what produces the sense of being seen. Left unchanneled, she says, what could happen is that the same vulnerability becomes fear instead, and takes you somewhere very different.

You are the expert on your own life

"Writing gives you narrative authority," Bryden says. "It’s this idea that you are the expert on your life. You are the expert on what has happened to you and only you can really tell your story in a meaningful way. Nobody can do that for you."

The idea comes from narrative therapy, and she names her source: a 1990 book by Michael White and David Epston called "Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends," which she references directly in her own book. One of its core concepts is externalizing, and her illustration is the distance between saying "I am an anxious person" and saying "I’m here and anxiety is visiting me right now." Same week, different location for the problem.

The payoff she describes is a shift in position. An experience you had no say over becomes something you exercise authority over through the telling of it. "So it’s empowering in that way," she says.

The reading-back is where people tend to catch themselves. In writing exercises she has run, participants read their own poem back and report that they had not realized how angry they were, or that something from years ago was still sitting there untouched. The poem knew before they did.

You do not need to know why it works

There is an eight-item list of what happens to a person during writing, and Bryden waves it off. "There’s lots of research behind all these different things, lots of theory about it," she says. "But you don’t have to know any of this to benefit from poetry, which is why in my book, I really don’t talk about it at all. I just sort of say, here, let’s write some bad poetry."

The omission is the point of the book. Part of her stated mission is making mental health more accessible to people who cannot get to a therapist, whether the barrier is cost or the hours it takes. "You can be bad at it and you can still reap the benefits," she says.

One boundary, though. Bryden is a therapist describing a tool she also uses inside clinical work, which is a different thing from the version you run alone at a kitchen table. A practice like this belongs in the preventative layer, the thing you do while life is ordinary so you have more capacity available when it stops being ordinary. Seasons arrive when a person needs professional care, and a notebook does not stand in for that.

Six experiments to try

1. Label the page before you write on it. Put the words "bad poem" at the top. The label is the permission structure, and the entire approach runs on it.
2. Try it by hand. Bryden recommends handwriting because it slows you further than typing does.
3. Pick your metaphor before your subject. Start with something you understand thoroughly, a weather system or a sport you used to play, then lay it over the thing you cannot name yet.
4. Leave the contradictions in. If two opposite things feel true, put both on the page. Nothing has to resolve. Bryden’s own answer to which poems are autobiographical was to let it be ambiguous.
5. Read it aloud to yourself. Do it alone with the door closed the first few times. Bryden says the experience changes when your voice carries it.
6. Write about the thing you are avoiding. Bryden’s read is that perfectionism steers attention toward something safer. The subject you keep circling and not writing is usually the one worth the ten minutes.

If you want more structure than that, Bryden gives away a free downloadable bad poetry guide on her book page.

The bar is the point

Plenty of people who say they cannot write are really reporting a standard they cannot meet. Bad poetry swaps that standard on purpose, and what it puts there instead is a bar you clear by being honest.

If you want somewhere to keep a practice like this going day to day, that is what NUE is built for.

A poem you never polished for anybody’s approval is the most honest thing you are likely to write all week. Write the bad one.