What Poetry Did for Me That I Didn’t Expect

by Daniel Stern

It took me a long time to recognize what had happened.

After the death of my son, I started writing poetry. Initially, I did it out of necessity—then
out of habit—without thinking of it as anything more than a way to put something on the
page that ordinary language could not hold. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. I
wasn’t working toward insight or resolution. I was writing because it was the only form
that didn’t collapse under the weight of what I was trying to express.

Only later did I begin to notice the result.

Without intending it, I had begun to experience some of the same outcomes people often seek in therapy.

Not because poetry guided me—it did not.
Not because it interpreted my experience—it could not.
Not because it offered direction or advice—it never did.

But because it allowed certain things to happen that had not been possible before.

The first was articulation.

There were aspects of the experience that could not be said directly—not because I lacked vocabulary, but because the available language was not built to carry them. When I tried to speak in ordinary terms, what came out felt reduced—smaller than what it was meant to hold.

Poetry did not solve that problem. It bypassed it.

Through image, structure, and fragmentation, it allowed something to be placed on the page that was not an explanation, but was still recognizable as true. It made it possible to express the experience without forcing it into a form it could not survive.

In one poem, my granddaughter asks for a story about her father. I can tell her what happened. I can describe who he was. But in the poem, what appears is something else: the act of measuring him out in bedtime portions, trying to make a father out of what’s left, while holding back what cannot be given to her. That tension—between what can be passed on and what cannot—exists in the poem without being resolved into a statement.

In another, I divide the world into people who have earned my patience and those who have not. It sounds precise, even justified, when said directly. But the poem allows the boundary to destabilize—details enter that undo the certainty, and what begins as clarity reveals itself as something closer to fatigue or fear. The shift is not argued. It happens.

Poetry did not make these things clearer. It allowed them to exist without being simplified.

The second was structure.

Grief does not arrive in a coherent narrative. It is uneven, contradictory, and resistant to being ordered.

Writing a poem did not impose a story on that experience. But it did give it shape.

A beginning. A boundary. A form that could be returned to.

What had been diffuse became something that could be encountered again and again without requiring it to change.

In one poem, I built something with my granddaughter—made from marshmallows and toothpicks, a structure that leaned, but held. It did not correct what had been lost. It did not resolve anything. But it showed how weight could be distributed, how something unstable could still stand. The poem worked the same way.

By giving grief a stable form, the poem creates something that can be returned to, allowing the relationship it holds to continue in a way that is no longer dependent on time or presence.

The third was continuity.

Loss disrupts more than emotion. It disrupts relationship, identity, and the sense of how time moves forward. What was once ongoing becomes fixed. What was shared becomes internal.

The poems created a different kind of continuation.

Not a replacement for what was lost, and not a reconstruction of it. But a way of remaining in contact—through memory, through language, through the act of returning to the same lines and finding that they still held.

In one poem, I describe a structure that once depended on a single unseen support—a linchpin holding everything in place. When it fails, the system does not collapse all at once. The load shifts. Other elements begin to carry what they were not designed to hold. The form changes, but it does not disappear.

What was once supported directly is now distributed—held differently, across new points of contact.

Loss works in a similar way. The central relationship is gone, but what moved through it does not vanish. It redistributes—into memory, into habit, into the ways we continue to move through the world shaped by what is no longer there.

The poem does not restore the original structure. But it allows that redistribution to be seen and returned to—not as something broken beyond recognition, but as something that continues, changed but still bearing weight.

The fourth was tolerance for what does not resolve.

There is a pressure, both internal and external, to arrive at some form of understanding—to make sense of what has happened, to find meaning that can be clearly stated and shared. If articulation allows the experience to be expressed without reduction, then tolerance allows it to remain unresolved without being forced into meaning.

In some poems, nothing resolves. The movement continues—layer opening into layer, question into question—without arriving anywhere that can be called an answer.

In one poem, I describe living between opposing forces—pulled in two directions at once, neither of which releases its hold. There is no synthesis, no moment where the tension settles into balance. Even perception becomes unstable—what is seen cannot be trusted, what is felt cannot be translated cleanly.

The poem does not resolve that tension. It remains inside it—there is no conclusion to carry forward, no meaning that stabilizes the experience.

If anything, poetry made it possible to remain with what does not resolve—without forcing it into an answer that felt untrue. It allowed contradictions to stand and questions to remain open.

Conclusion

Over time, something else shifted.

I had written more than seventy poems. Many began in grief. But the more recent ones moved beyond it—not because the grief had resolved, but because something in me had changed.

The poems made it possible to say what I had long carried without language for—not by explaining it, but by giving it a form it could exist within.

None of this means poetry is therapy. It does not guide or interpret. It does not offer a path forward.

What it did—at least for me—was create a structure where experience could remain intact.

In that structure, certain things became possible:

to express without reducing,
to return without reopening,
to remain without resolving.

It did not fix what had been broken.
It did not restore what had been lost.

But it made it possible to live with both—without forcing them into something smaller than they were.