Video Calls
Faces in windows, frozen smiles, love at the speed of a weak connection.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about video calls: vivid imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, with exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
A video call puts a face closer to you than most conversations ever allow, and keeps the person utterly out of reach. That is the theme in one sentence: intimacy through glass. You can count the grey hairs of someone you cannot hand a cup of tea. Poems about video calls work this junction of nearness and distance, along with the uncanny detail no other era offered: while you talk, a small window shows you your own face, watching.
It is also a theme of thresholds and rooms. Behind every face on the grid is a doorway, a bookshelf arranged for viewing, a hospital corridor, a wedding watched from another continent. And every call ends the same way: a click, then total silence, the room suddenly returned to you. That abrupt cut is a gift, a built-in ending waiting for a poem brave enough to use it.
Why poets return to it
In the space of a few years, our most serious rituals moved onto these screens: funerals attended in pyjamas, grandchildren met at one day old, last conversations conducted through lag. A poet who wants to write honestly about family, love, or grief now often has to write through a camera, and the camera changes everything worth noticing.
The form is technically suggestive too. Frames within frames mirror stanzas; lag and glitch offer ready-made disruptions of rhythm; the mute button is dramatic irony you can hold in your hand. Few themes hand over so much structure for free.
Where it comes from
Poets have always written across distance. John Donne, leaving for the continent in the early 1600s, argued that two joined souls apart are like the legs of a compass, still connected however far one roams. Anne Bradstreet sent verse letters to her absent husband. Classical Chinese poets looked at the moon and took comfort that a faraway family saw the same one: the shared moon was their video call.
The pandemic years produced a surge of poems set in the grid of squares, elegies delivered to laptop cameras, love poems timed to a fragile connection. The theme is young, but it plugged straight into one of poetry's oldest sockets: the beloved who is present and absent at once.
The elements that carry it
- The frozen frame: a face stopped mid-word, mid-laugh, suddenly a portrait.
- The phrase 'you're on mute,' this century's most repeated small tragedy.
- The grid of squares, like a contact sheet of everyone you miss.
- Your own thumbnail face in the corner, the self as uninvited witness.
- The black screen after the call ends, holding a faint reflection where the person was.
Techniques that work
- Use the frame as a rule: describe only what the camera sees, then break the rule once, powerfully, for what it cannot.
- Let lag shape the rhythm: repeated words, stalled syntax, a sentence finishing on a frozen smile.
- Write the after: begin the poem the second the call ends, in the silence the click leaves behind.
- Address your own corner thumbnail in second person; the self-window is a ready-made double.
- Split sound from image, as the technology does: the voice arriving before the face, or without it.
Mistakes to avoid
- Cataloguing apps and features instead of people. Brand names date in months; the grandmother's face does not.
- Playing every glitch for comedy. A parent's frozen frame can carry dread or tenderness; choose.
- The complaint poem about screen fatigue. We all know; find the one call that mattered instead.
- Forgetting the body outside the frame: the hands, the chair, the tea going cold beside the laptop.
An exercise
Recall one video call that mattered, good or terrible. Write two stanzas: the first containing only what the camera showed, the second only what it could not show. Do not label which is which; let the reader feel the border.
A challenge
Write three short poems about the same two people: a call answered, a call declined, and a call that dropped mid-sentence. Keep the setting identical and let only the connection change the emotional weather.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which someone keeps talking to a frozen screen, saying to the still image what they could never say to the moving one.
Before you submit
- At least one detail sits outside the camera's view.
- Any technical language earns its place emotionally.
- The poem contains a moment of nearness and a moment of distance.
- The ending uses the call's natural cut, or resists it deliberately.
- No sentence exists only to complain about screens.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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