Money
Write the subject everyone thinks about and almost no one puts in poems.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about money: earning, lacking and longing made concrete, with craft techniques, honest exercises and prompts in this Writory guide.
What this theme is
Money is one of poetry's great open secrets. It shapes more daily emotion than romance does, relief on payday, dread at the letterbox, the quiet arithmetic running under every family decision, yet poets often treat it as beneath the art. It is not. A money poem takes the numbers everyone carries in their head and asks what they weigh in the body: the checkout hesitation, the coat worn a fourth winter, the pride and shame braided into the phrase 'we couldn't afford it'.
Money in poems is never just currency; it is time made visible, love made measurable, power made portable. A twenty-pound note in a poem is also the hours someone traded for it and the thing it will fail to buy. When you write money, you are writing what your speaker believes life costs, and that belief is character.
Why poets return to it
Poets who take money seriously gain instant access to their readers' real lives. Everyone has stood at a cash machine hoping; almost no one has said so in company. Poems get to say so, and the reader's recognition is immediate and physical.
The theme also carries built-in dramatic tension, since money always sits between people: parents and children, couples, friends who earn differently. Writory's judges score emotion and theme alongside language, and money poems, done honestly, arrive with all three already in tension.
Where it comes from
Poets have counted coins for centuries, often bitterly. Robert Frost's 'Provide, Provide' offers grimly practical advice about securing your position before age arrives. Philip Larkin addressed money directly in a 1973 poem, hearing it sing like a sad choir and admitting he could not spend his way out of mortality. Dana Gioia, a poet who spent years as a business executive, built a poem entirely from money's slang, riffing on Wallace Stevens's remark that money is a kind of poetry.
Alongside them runs the poetry of not having it: Paul Laurence Dunbar's 'The Debt', ballads of rent day and pawnshops, Depression-era verse, and contemporary poems about zero-hours contracts. Lack has always been more articulate than plenty.
The elements that carry it
- Physical money and its rituals: folded notes, the jar of coins, the envelope of cash at a wedding, the wallet's worn photograph.
- Documents of anxiety: bills, bank statements, the red-stamped reminder, the receipt kept for a reason.
- Places of transaction: the cash machine's glow, the pawnshop window, the till, the kitchen table where sums are done.
- Inherited attitudes: a parent's voice about waste, the family's silences around wages, hand-me-down thrift.
- The bodily register: the stomach-drop of an unexpected charge, the lightness of payday, hunger deferred.
Techniques that work
- Use exact figures. 'Fourteen pounds short' is a poem; 'not enough money' is a sigh. Specific sums carry period, class and stakes.
- Let money mediate a relationship: write the scene where it changes hands between two people, and keep the camera on the hands.
- Convert currency into time or objects inside the poem, an hour of shelf-stacking per cinema ticket, so the reader feels the exchange rate of a life.
- Deploy the language of finance ironically or tenderly against intimate subjects: interest, balance, credit, all double beautifully.
- Write the ritual, counting, hiding, saving, lending, as choreography; money behaviour is inherited gesture, and gesture is image.
Mistakes to avoid
- Moralising that money does not matter. Readers know it does; poems pretending otherwise forfeit trust immediately.
- Vagueness about amounts and stakes. Fix it with real numbers, real prices, real shortfalls.
- Writing only contempt for wealth or only envy of it. The honest register is usually mixed: wanting, judging, wanting anyway.
- Forgetting the third parties. Money scenes gain power when someone else is watching: the child at the checkout, the sibling who earns more.
An exercise
Recall the first time you understood your family had more, or less, money than another family. Write the scene at child height: what was seen, said and not said. Include one exact price or amount, and end before any adult explanation arrives.
A challenge
Keep every receipt for one week, then write a poem sequence of three short parts: the purchase you regret, the purchase that was really for someone else, and the purchase that was really a wish. Use the actual amounts.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about lending money to someone you love, structured around the moment of handing it over, in which neither person says what they are both thinking.
Before you submit
- At least one exact figure or price appears and earns its place.
- Money moves between people somewhere in the poem, not just through a mind.
- The speaker's class position and attitudes are legible without a lecture.
- Financial vocabulary, if used, is repurposed with intent.
- The ending lands on cost in the deepest sense, not on a moral about greed.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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