Can a Poem Be About Anything?
Quick answer: Can a poem be about anything? Yes: poems exist about onions, wasps and spreadsheets. What matters is the quality of attention, not the dignity of the subject.
Yes, a poem can be about anything: onions, motorway service stations, a spreadsheet, the smell of a swimming pool. There are no reserved subjects in poetry, and the twentieth century spent considerable energy proving it, from Neruda's odes to socks and salt to Williams insisting a red wheelbarrow deserved the reader's whole attention.
The honest refinement is that while any subject can hold a poem, no subject guarantees one. A poem about the moon can be dead on arrival and a poem about a parking ticket can break your heart. What readers respond to is never the topic's dignity; it is the quality of attention brought to it, and the pressure the subject is put under.
How poetry annexed the ordinary
For centuries, decorum ruled: epic deeds, noble love and death were poetic, and chamber pots were not. Wordsworth cracked the door by writing about leech-gatherers and idiot boys in common speech. The modernists kicked it open, and by the time Neruda wrote his odes to ordinary things, an onion could be praised in the same register once reserved for gods. Contemporary poetry assumes the whole world is admissible: there are anthologised poems about dial-up modems, chicken shops and IKEA.
This was not a lowering of standards but a raising of stakes: if anything can be a poem's subject, the poet can no longer hide behind an impressive topic. The craft has to do all the work.
Attention is the actual subject
What transforms an arbitrary topic into a poem is sustained, particular attention, the kind that notices what everyone sees and nobody says. A micro-example: 'The stapler bites and does not let go. / All day it holds what we decided, / jaw shut on the minutes of the meeting.' The stapler is a pretext; the poem is about permanence, agreement and small violence. Every humble subject works this way: watched long enough, it opens onto something human.
That is the test worth applying to any 'unpoetic' subject you fancy: not 'is this poetic?' but 'what does this open onto?'. If the answer is nothing yet, look longer.
The practical limits that do exist
Freedom of subject is not freedom from consequence. Some subjects carry legal and ethical weight: identifiable living people, other people's trauma told without care, material that particular venues will not print. And some subjects are so pre-loaded with existing poems, sunsets, mirrors, the sea, that you inherit a thousand cliches with the topic and must out-write them all. Neither issue forbids the subject; both raise the difficulty rating.
Themed contests add a friendly constraint: the subject is set, and originality moves to the angle. Writory's monthly themes work exactly this way, and the winning angle on a shared theme is almost never the obvious one.
Choosing your subject like a poet
Strong subjects tend to share three features: you have first-hand sensory knowledge of them, they connect to something you actually feel, and you can see them from an angle nobody has used. An unglamorous subject you know intimately beats a grand subject you know from other poems, every time. Your expertise, night shifts, aquarium keeping, a language your grandmother spoke, is a subject bank nobody else can raid.
What poets can take from this
- Test a subject by asking what it opens onto, not whether it sounds poetic.
- Prefer subjects you know with your senses over subjects you know from other poems.
- Treat over-written topics like the moon as a difficulty setting: possible, but you must beat a thousand cliches.
- Mine your own odd expertise; it is material no other poet owns.
- Handle real people and others' trauma with care and, where needed, disguise.
- For themed contests, brainstorm ten angles and discard the first five as too obvious.
Try it yourself
Write an ode in the Neruda spirit to the least poetic object in your home, a router, a bin, a phone charger, praising it with complete sincerity until the praise reveals something true about your household.
Questions
What subjects are most common in poetry?
Love, death, nature, time and family dominate every anthology, which is precisely why fresh angles on them are hard-won. Unusual subjects give you clearer air, provided the poem still touches something human.
Can a poem be about something silly?
Absolutely; light verse is a proud tradition from Lear to contemporary comic poets. The craft standards do not drop, and the best silly poems usually smuggle in one line of unexpected weight.
Do contest poems need serious themes?
No. Judges score craft and effect, not solemnity, and a witty poem executed sharply routinely beats an earnest one executed loosely. If a theme is set, any tone that genuinely engages it is fair game.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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