i love meeting people who hate poetry

because it's rarely true

When I’m up against it,

when this timeline is thick and unrelenting,

when the world closes in and every door feels bolted shut,

you need a lifeline. I need some Saving Grace. We reach for more of ourselves. We need New Ways.

When you are pinned beneath what cannot be spoken, you need more than a coping strategy. More than endurance. You need a bridge. Toward recognition. Resonance. Survival. We want to feel seen, held, and understood. That’s what poetry is. Besides the beauty and decoration, poetry is a means of reorganising experience when things feel too large or unbearable.

I love meeting people who hate poetry. It’s fun to change their minds. I secretly believe there’s a poem for everyone. Poetry is your favourite song, poetry is a children’s nursery rhyme, Poetry is an affirmation at the right time.

Neuroscience tells us that each experience reshapes the brain, carving glistening new pathways, reinforcing old patterns, or pruning what is no longer needed. Every new or repeated thought, every rage we swallow, every desire - all of it is brain architecture. The brain is butter-plastic: moldable, changeable, rewritable. Nothing about you is anywhere close to final. Poetry, or rather, a poetic mindset, can help us reshape how we move through the world. It can help you stay alive in a dying system. I want to dream beyond the emotional holding pen of my own experience, and constantly interrogate my idea of what is true. The antidote to the trap is imagination, and you change your world by changing your brain.

All very well, you might say, but how?

And why poetry, not something else?

Well, I’m not pie-in-the-sky enough to try to convince you that poetry is how we fix the world, and that all we need to get by are daily rhyming couplets. I want to move this from Poetry Will Save You, into Developing a Poetic Mind Will Save You. It will reframe your reality as an active, neurological, nervous system-calming, life-extending act.