Selfies
The self-portrait moved into your pocket: write about the faces we make and the ones we delete.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about selfies: honest imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, with exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
The selfie poem belongs to the long tradition of the self-portrait: a subject watching itself being seen. The theme is not vanity, or not only vanity. It is the negotiation between the face you have and the face you are willing to show, conducted fourteen times before breakfast. Those thirteen deleted attempts are the real material. A camera roll of near-identical faces is a rough draft of the self, and poets know what to do with rough drafts.
Selfies are also witness and record: taken at gravesides, in hospital beds, at protests, before the interview and after the diagnosis. Proof of 'I was here, and this is what here did to my face.' The deepest question the theme asks is simple and unnerving: who is the photograph for? Answer that in a poem and you have written about audience, mortality and love all at once.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose this theme because it drags self-regard into the open where it can finally be examined honestly. Every poem is already a kind of selfie, a self arranged in language for viewers, so writing about the camera becomes a way of writing about writing, without a whiff of the seminar room.
It is also the sharpest available lens on identity: the filtered face, the angled face, the face for the family group and the face for the stranger. Whitman needed sixty pages to sing himself; you have been curating a gallery of selves since your first front camera.
Where it comes from
Walt Whitman opened his 1855 masterpiece by announcing that he celebrated himself, arguably literature's grandest selfie, complete with flattering lighting. A century later Sylvia Plath gave the mirror its own cold, patient voice, letting the reflecting surface tell the truth the woman could not. John Ashbery spent a book-length poem studying a Renaissance painter's self-portrait in a convex mirror: distortion at the very centre of self-regard, which is a fair description of a front camera.
Lucille Clifton, meanwhile, celebrated a self the world had given no model for, shaping self-portraiture into survival. The selfie poem can draw on all of this: praise, interrogation, distortion, defiance.
The elements that carry it
- The front camera's slight distortion, the nose a little wrong, the self almost right.
- Ring lights and golden hour, lighting chosen the way sonnets chose their metaphors.
- Filters that smooth a face into a plausible stranger.
- The camera roll of near-identical takes, a flick-book of tiny hopes.
- Accidental mirrors everywhere: shop windows, phone glass gone black, the backs of spoons.
Techniques that work
- Write the outtakes: describe the thirteen deleted photographs rather than the one that was posted.
- Give the camera or the mirror the speaking voice, after Plath's move, and let it be honest where the human cannot.
- Use the caption as a form: a poem that begins as a photo caption and outgrows its photograph.
- Split the grammar of self on purpose: the I photographing the me, photographer and subject and audience as three separate characters.
- Anchor the selfie in an occasion. One taken before a funeral or after chemotherapy says more than any commentary on narcissism ever will.
Mistakes to avoid
- The narcissism lecture. It is easy, smug, and finished before it starts. Implicate yourself instead; your camera roll has faces in it too.
- Filter-equals-fake as an automatic equation, without wondering why someone might need the smoothing that day.
- Letting abstractions like 'identity' and 'image' do work that one specific photograph should be doing.
- Forgetting the body behind the phone: the aching raised arm, the tilted chin, the crowd pretending not to watch.
An exercise
Open your camera roll to the most recent selfie you kept. Write two short stanzas: what happened in the minute before it was taken, and what happened in the minute after. The photograph itself may appear only in the title.
A challenge
Write a self-portrait poem three times, in three technologies: as an oil painting, as a photo booth strip, as a front-camera shot. Notice what each medium lets you hide, and what it refuses to.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in the voice of a deleted selfie: the take that was almost good enough, speaking from the bin.
Before you submit
- The poem contains at least one actual, specific photograph, not photographs in general.
- The body behind the camera is present somewhere.
- Abstract nouns about identity are outnumbered by images.
- The speaker is implicated, not merely superior.
- The ending complicates the face rather than judging it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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