How Writing for PoetrySoup Can Help Reduce Anxiety

What is a poem? Words that spring up from our souls, a way to make art out of the swirling thoughts in our heads, or carefully planned out prose. Probably a little bit of each. I’d like to tell you how writing for PoetrySoup can help people reduce their anxiety by capturing each of the opportunities above to write a poem.

Often, we poets subconsciously collect magical words we encounter from all sources. They might be from a conversation had or a conversation overheard. They might be a word on a program we are watching, from a book or article we read. It might even be something on a street-side, movie marquee, or in the junk mail in our mailbox. These words build up in us. Then, when we face situations that we can’t quite make sense of, we use these words to write beautiful poems on PoetrySoup that bring joy to others and sense to ourselves.

In today's world, everyone is multitasking all the time. It starts the moment we wake up and never seems to end. Often, we have random thoughts bombarding our brains, keeping us from sleeping a wink. If we pick up a pen or sit down at our laptop and write down these random thoughts on PoetrySoup, they often turn into the poems people like best because they seem serendipitous and truly reflect a swirl of unrestricted creativity.

With everything changing so fast now, many people feel they lack control. One way to feel in control is to write a structured poem, perhaps for one of the PoetrySoup contests. By challenging ourselves to write in an organized form, we gain an eerie control over the ideas that often seem to control us. Limericks and Sonnets are great examples of forms that bring organization and structure to our otherwise beloved randomness.

PoetrySoup provides a platform for the world’s most creative and interesting people to reduce their own anxiety by writing down their ideas and brightening others' days when they read the results.