Television
The blue glow that raised half the world's poets is a subject, not just a distraction.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about television: the blue glow, shared screens and static, with craft techniques, mistakes and prompts in this Writory guide for poets.
What this theme is
Television in a poem is rarely about the programme. It is about the room: who is watching, who fell asleep, who is using the screen to avoid a conversation, whose empty armchair still faces it. The set is a hearth that talks back, a stranger given the best seat in the house, and poems about it are really poems about attention, company and the peculiar loneliness of being entertained. The laugh track playing to a silent room is one of the modern lyric's readiest images of disconnection.
The theme also spans generations of hardware, and each era carries its own charge: the single family set with its fought-over channels, the aerial adjusted by a father's raised arm, static after closedown, and now screens that follow us from room to room. A television poem can date itself precisely with one detail, which makes the theme a superb vehicle for memory and elegy.
Why poets return to it
Poets write television because it sits at the centre of domestic life yet almost never gets looked at directly; the camera of the poem simply turns around. Whole family histories are legible in viewing habits: what was allowed, what was sacred, who held the remote.
It is also a theme of mediated feeling, grief delayed until the news ends, love expressed as watching the same show apart, and poems are precision instruments for exactly that indirectness. Handled well, the screen becomes the poem's second speaker.
Where it comes from
Poetry noticed television almost as soon as it arrived. Roald Dahl's gleeful verse tirade in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from 1964, ordered families to throw the set out entirely, an early sign of how much anxiety the new hearth provoked. In the same decade Frank O'Hara was cheerfully welcoming pop culture into serious poems, opening the door the television walked through.
Anne Carson's TV Men sequence later put figures like Hektor and Socrates in front of the cameras, using the medium's language, takes, close-ups, cue cards, to examine how screens rewrite even the oldest stories. Around such landmarks runs a broad tradition of domestic poems where the set glows in the corner of an elegy: the game show a dying parent loved, the news muted during dinner, the static after a life's closedown.
The elements that carry it
- The blue flicker on faces and walls, light that moves and means someone is still awake.
- The furniture of watching: the good chair, the remote's territory, dinner trays, a sofa's worn places.
- Sound bleeding between rooms, applause, gunfire, weather forecasts, narrating the house from a distance.
- Static, test cards and closedown, the medium's own images of absence and ending.
- The screen at odd hours: hospitals, launderettes, airport lounges, a shop window of muted televisions all showing the same disaster.
Techniques that work
- Split the poem's attention between screen and room, cutting like an editor between what plays and what the watchers do, and let the gap between the two carry the feeling.
- Borrow broadcast language, stay tuned, we now return, a word from our sponsors, and re-aim it at the poem's human situation.
- Use a specific programme as a time machine: one title can set the decade, the household and the speaker's age without exposition.
- Let the set be on but unwatched at the poem's key moment; television is often most eloquent as ignored background.
- Try muting it. Describing images without sound, or sound heard from another room without images, halves the medium and doubles its strangeness.
Mistakes to avoid
- Sermonising about screens rotting minds. Dahl did it first, in better verse, for children; adult poems need complicity, not just complaint.
- Writing the programme instead of the room. Recaps belong to reviewers; the poem's material is the watching.
- Generic sets in generic rooms. The poem needs this remote with its worn volume button, this channel the family never missed.
- Nostalgia without pressure. Old jingles and test cards charm easily; make the remembered screen cost or reveal something.
An exercise
Write down five television memories from childhood, each one anchored to a specific person in the room rather than to the show. Choose the memory where the person and the programme are most at odds, and write the poem in that gap.
A challenge
Write a poem in which a television plays through a family's most important conversation, and revise it three times: once foregrounding the screen, once the people, once the sound alone. Keep whichever version tells the truth most obliquely.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a television left on for company in an otherwise empty house, and the person, absent or gone, whose habit that was.
Before you submit
- The people around the set matter more than what plays on it.
- One era-specific detail anchors the poem in time.
- Any critique of screen life implicates the speaker too.
- Sound and light from the set are rendered as physical presences in the room.
- The ending resists both easy nostalgia and easy sermon.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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