How to Write About a Place Without Writing a Travel Brochure

Poems about a city, a town, or a village fail when they describe the place instead of the life inside it. A judge on the postcard trap, the three moves that turn a place poem into a real one, and the question that tells you if the poem is about the place or about you.

Every contest has a stack of place poems, the city the poet grew up in, the town they moved to, the village they visit once a year. Most of them are postcards: the skyline, the smell, the food, the sound of the place, arranged in a list that reads like a travel brochure. The poem describes the place instead of living in it.

The place poem that works is not about the place. It is about the life that happens inside it.

The postcard trap

The postcard poem is the one that tells you what the place looks like. The buildings, the streets, the weather, the local colour. It is accurate and it is flat, because the place is the subject and the subject is the one thing the reader can see for themselves.

A poem about a place should not describe the place. It should describe what the place does to the person who is in it.

The three moves that turn a place poem into a real one

Move one: put a person in it. The place poem that works has a person in it, a mother, a stranger, a self. The place is the stage; the person is the play. The poem is about the person in the place, not the place itself.

Move two: give the place a job. The place should be doing something, making a sound, holding a memory, blocking a view. If the place is just sitting there, it is a backdrop. If it is doing something, it is a subject.

Move three: let the place change you. The best place poems are the ones where the speaker is different at the end than they were at the beginning, and the place is the thing that changed them. The place is the agent; the poem is the change.

The question that decides

Here is the question I ask when I am judging a place poem: is this poem about the place, or is it about the person in the place? If the answer is the place, it is a postcard. If the answer is the person, it is a poem.

The postcard poem says 'this is what I saw'. The real place poem says 'this is what happened to me here'. The difference is the difference between a travel brochure and a life.

A worked example

Bad: 'The city at night is all lights and noise and the smell of food from the carts.' The city is the subject; the speaker is absent.

Better: 'I learned to cross the street by watching the old man with the cart, and I have been crossing streets by watching strangers ever since.' The city is the teacher; the speaker is the student. The poem is about the person who learned the city, not the city itself.

Where it goes wrong

The trap is the poem that is a love letter to the place. The love letter is not a poem; it is a thank-you note. The poem is the thing that the place did to the person who was in it, and the doing is the work.

If you want to see a place poem that is about the person, the prompts library has a set on home and away, and the contest window is open when the draft is ready. The place is the stage. The person is the play.

Keep reading

For the craft side, the imagery module covers the deeper method. The prompts library is the page to read next, and the negative-space module is where the work goes when it is done.

By Writory Editorial, for Writory.

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