Playful Poetry: On Utilizing Silliness to Overcome Serious Writing Anxiety

By Katie Holtmeyer

I used to be the bravest writer I knew. 

Although this was true mostly because I didn’t know many other writers at seven years old, this brazen confidence did not stay with me long. As a kid, I fearlessly shared my poetry with anyone who wanted to listen to it, and many who didn’t. But as I grew, I began to feel guarded about my poetry, fearing the reactions, fearing the poems weren’t any good, didn’t say anything new, or revealed too much. I knew, though, that this was no way to write, that the writing that most profoundly impacted me was most likely the scariest for that author to share. I wanted to get back to a place where I had no barriers between what I wrote when I knew no one would be reading it and what I wrote for others to see. Unfortunately, that thought terrified me, so I began brainstorming solutions for overcoming this fear, and the answer I found was process, play, and, shockingly, some silliness.

In Around the Writer’s Block, Roseanne Bane describes the way that play can reduce stress, improve creativity, and help us “make new associations and connections,” which, given that poetry is all about associations, makes Bane’s suggestions especially helpful for my preferred genre. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, makes a similar argument to Bane, that taking ourselves less seriously and focusing on the “imagination-at-play” can enrich our writing, a prospect I’d find helpful in counteracting the painful and unutterable heaviness of the topics I sometimes touch on in my poetry.

There are several ways resistance can hold back writing, and because I was nervous that my fear of the vulnerable, raw nature inherent in most poetry would keep me from writing and sharing the poetry I wanted to, I drew heavily on the work of Bane, Cameron, and others in order to implement more play into my life, with the ultimate goal of being able to write, and share, authentic poems. I decided to play—usually in the form of coloring or painting—for roughly ten to fifteen minutes before each writing or revising session. The goal was to tap into the childlike joy of creating something for the sake of creating it, and to do so immediately before writing to translate that feeling into the writing itself. 

I can’t say I didn’t have several concerns going into this plan. I worried about the validity of spending precious writing time on something that, at its core, is designed to be all about the process and not at all about the product. In a product-driven world, this felt wasteful. Additionally, focusing on “fun” felt at odds with the heavy nature of the content I was writing. I feared that taking a lighthearted approach would somehow undermine the seriousness of my work. However, I’d soon find each of these fears unfounded. 

In fact, this practice worked better than I could have imagined. I found that playing before writing helped to take my mind off the building anxiety that tended to plague me, and lowered my defenses in a way that helped me tap back into the writer I was as a child and pre-teen, the one who wrote from her heart, consequences be damned. Somewhere along the line, the play that preceded the poetry writing seeped into the writing itself, too, an occurrence discussed by Richard Hugo, who asserts in his collection of essays entitled The Triggering Town, “you have to be silly to write poems at all,” and notes that a “way of getting into the world of the imagination is to focus on play rather than the value of words.” 

This tinkering of language, like the pre-writing tinkering with clay, colored pencils, and paint I was already doing, became another foundation of my practice in playful writing. I manipulated the words as I wrote as well as when I initially revised, trying new techniques without too much deliberation, just for the sake of seeing what would happen. Sometimes this meant engaging with the more exploratory traditions of poetry. Other times, this meant trying out prompts or gamified strategies I wouldn’t normally, like writing a poem entirely comprised of quotes or forcing myself to write poems that had to contain particular pre-determined words. For instance, a group of writer friends and I would often write a collection of sometimes random, sometimes themed words on a white board and take turns throwing erasers at it—the first three words they landed on had to go in our next poem or story. This, a form of play in the process of the actual drafting itself, got at the same goals of the pre-writing play—my guard was down, I was usually laughing, and I wrote without getting too caught up in overthinking. It was, to return to Hugo, silly. Though this act was fun and lighthearted, and at times led to terrible or very surface level poems, I was surprised at how much genuine, heartfelt work came out of it. Perhaps it was my biases about the tortured writer holding me back, but it went against so many of my assumptions to create from a place of joy rather than one of sadness and solitude. 

This should not be surprising, though, if one has read Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, in which he argues that it is okay, even good, to enjoy writing poetry, despite these long-held ideals of the much-suffering poet, and that it’s “okay to be goofy, it is okay to be funny…laughter throws us forward, levity raises us, the body opens.” Just as comedy can be a tool that allows us to process tough issues while our guard is down, laughter in the creation of poetry can do the same. This isn’t to say that many or even most of my poems don’t sprout in some way from times of suffering, but as I tried playful writing, I saw for the first time that equally valid poems can come from a lighter place, and that returning to acts that bring us joy with no other clear, measurable gains is not a waste of time. Now, when I come across a writer plagued by my same anxieties, I recommend adding some play into their poetry—whether it’s a killer piece or writing or a stronger peace of mind, the results can be well worth the efforts. 

Katie Holtmeyer received an MA from Truman State University, and she currently lives, writes, and teaches in a small town in Missouri. She is a pushcart-nominated author, and her poetry has appeared in Vast Chasm, Stanchion Zine, 3 Moon Magazine, the lickety~split, and The Shore, among others. You can find more of her work at https://www.katieholtmeyer.com. Her debut poetry collection, She Asked Me Where, is out with Unsolicited Press January 9th, 2024.