Guitars
Six strings, one body shaped like a question: write the instrument that travels.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about guitars: imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises and prompts, all in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
The guitar is the most portable of confessions. It goes where pianos cannot: the campfire, the bedsit, the border crossing, the prison yard, and because it travels with the body, poems about guitars are usually poems about the people holding them. The instrument even borrows human anatomy, neck, body, waist, so that writing about a guitar slides naturally into writing about an embrace, and poets have leaned on that likeness for centuries.
A guitar poem can centre on the player, the listener, or the object between songs: the case plastered with stickers, the string that snaps mid-set, the pawned instrument that stands for a surrendered life. Silence matters as much as sound here. A guitar on a stand in the corner of a room where someone used to play is one of the loudest images the theme offers.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose the guitar because it stands at the crossroads of poetry and song, and lets a poem talk about its own ambitions sideways. It is also an instrument of the unofficial: flamenco caves, blues porches, protest marches, teenagers' bedrooms. Writing it lets a poet reach music that never asked permission. And the guitar carries class and struggle lightly; a pawnshop window full of guitars says more about hard times than a page of statistics, which is exactly the kind of compression poems exist for.
Where it comes from
Federico García Lorca gave the theme its great modern poem: in his deep song poems the guitar begins to weep and cannot be silenced, its cry rising like wind over snow, the sound of Andalusia's whole sorrow. Wallace Stevens answered from another direction with “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” a long meditation in which the player is accused of changing things as they are, the guitar standing for imagination itself. Behind both stretches older ground: flamenco's cante jondo, the blues arriving by railcar and 78 rpm disc, corridos and folk ballads, everywhere the guitar keeping the poor company.
The elements that carry it
- The instrument's body language: neck, waist, hips, the hollow that makes the sound possible.
- Hands at work: calluses, fingerpicks, the barre chord that took a winter to learn, blood on new strings.
- The case: stickers, velvet interior gone bald, coins thrown into it on a pavement.
- Contexts of playing: campfire, protest, hospital corridor, the bedroom with the door shut.
- Sound and its absence: a snapped string mid-song, feedback, tuning drift, the untouched guitar gathering dust.
Techniques that work
- Write the hands before the music: calluses, cracked knuckles and cheap plectrums tell the player's biography faster than any description of sound.
- Use the instrument's human anatomy deliberately, once; neck and waist and body can carry an embrace, but the likeness spoils with repetition.
- Put the guitar in an unexpected room, a courtroom, a care home, a customs queue, and let the setting interrogate the instrument.
- Let the poem follow one song from first chord to the silence after, and put the emotional turn in a mistake: the buzzed fret, the snapped string.
- Try Lorca's method: give the guitar's sound a series of escalating comparisons, each more impossible, until the poem admits the sound cannot be stopped or said.
Mistakes to avoid
- The guitar as universal shorthand for soul and freedom. Ground it: whose guitar, bought where, missing which string?
- Describing music with abstract superlatives, haunting, magical, soulful. Render sound through its effect on bodies and rooms instead.
- Overworking the guitar-as-woman conceit, which curdles quickly; one light touch of anatomy is plenty.
- Forgetting cost. Strings break, lessons are unaffordable, instruments get pawned; the economics of music is rich, underused material.
An exercise
Write a portrait of a guitarist in which you may describe only their hands and their guitar, never their face or their music. Ten to fourteen lines. If the poem makes us hear the playing anyway, it has worked.
A challenge
Write three short poems about the same guitar at three moments of ownership: the day it was bought, the night it mattered most, and the day it was sold, given away or left behind. Keep one physical detail constant.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a guitar hanging in a pawnshop window, and the person who stops on the pavement because they recognise the sticker on its body.
Before you submit
- The instrument has at least two physical particulars: a scratch, a sticker, a missing string.
- Hands appear, and they show the player's life.
- Sound is conveyed through effect and comparison, not labels like haunting.
- Any body-of-the-guitar likeness is used once and lightly.
- The setting adds pressure: the poem knows where this music happens.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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