Trust the Creative Process: Let the Poem Hustle to the Page

In this edition of "A Day in the Life," let's talk about the creative writing process. Since I'm a poet, let's talk about poetry!

Poetry, like any living culture, has roots that stretch far beyond the page. Long before lines were inked onto paper, before stanzas found their forms, poetry lived in the bodies, breath, and heartbeats of people finding ways to speak their worlds into being. When I talk about trusting the creative process, I’m paying homage to those wordsmiths and dream-makers—the griots, the jazz poets, the blues storytellers, the aunties who told the truth without raising their voices, the youth who scribbled secrets onto cracked composition notebooks in dimly lit bedrooms. In some circles, poetry has been reduced to clever rhymes or tidy Instagram slides or long narratives without much metaphor or figurative language. In younger circles, the ritual of revision, the sacred slowness of listening to language, feels almost forgotten. However, you do find young poets that completely understand the process and the benefits of revision. But the foundations of poetry—its rhythm, its honesty—remain untouched.

Writing a poem is not a clean act. It never has been. Poetry was born from the need of people—often people pushed to the margins—to speak their beauty and their bruises aloud. It gave voice to hearts, carrying too many unnamed feelings, too many unspoken truths. And just like the origins of hip-hop in the South Bronx, 1970s, poetry has always been a site of resistance, truth telling, and revelation. It is the place where bluesy attitude meets unfiltered vulnerability, where love and rage dance together with a kind of electric friction. Poetry offers us a platform to transform the chaos inside us into something textured, something resonant, something whole, and something that impacts others. 

But here’s the part that doesn’t get celebrated nearly enough: the creative process itself, the strange and winding journey from impulse to language. That’s the really unique and powerful part of the creative writing process, no matter what a writer is trying to compose. Trusting that process requires a kind of courage that isn’t flashy. It’s not the slick punchline, not the pretty metaphor, not the standing ovation. Trusting the creative process means surrendering. It means believing that the poem knows where it wants to go—even before you do.

When you sit down to write a poem, you are entering into a conversation with your own inner archives, experiences, and vulnerabilities. You are listening for the bassline of emotion beneath your breathing, the faint rhythm beneath your thoughts. Sometimes the poem arrives fully formed, already swaggering, confident, like it’s been waiting backstage for its cue. Most of the time, though, it shows up fragmented, half-mumbled, and unsure of itself. And that’s okay. That’s more than okay.

Because the early drafts—those messy, unpolished drafts—are where the truth lives. They carry the heat, the pulse, the raw energy. They hold the story before you’ve had a chance to tame it and give it form. Too often, people want their poems to be good before they let them be real. But poetry doesn’t work like that. You have to let the language wander. You have to let the lines break in ways that surprise you. You have to let the images contradict each other, then reconcile themselves. The creative writing process is a sort of jazz. You have to trust that your subconscious—your quietest, most honest artist—is doing work you can’t yet see.

You literally have to allow your creative instincts to sweep through. Give them that essential room to breathe. You tune into the cadence of your own inner world, the rhythm that has been shaping you long before you ever tried to shape words. The poem becomes less of a product to polish and more of a landscape to explore.

There will be days when every line feels off-beat. When the metaphors feel dull. When the page feels like it’s resisting you. But even then—especially then—you keep writing. Because the creative process isn’t about perfection. It’s about discovery. It’s about listening closely enough to hear the poem whisper its way into existence. It’s about trusting that the inspiration you felt, that spark that led you to the page, is part of something larger than the moment.

To write poetry is to participate in a lineage of creators who refused silence. It is to stand in the flow of a tradition that bends, evolves, and transforms but never disappears. And when you trust your creative process—when you allow your poems to emerge with their own rhythm, their own voice, their own truth—you join that tradition with intention. You become part of the ever-growing chorus of people who use language not just to express themselves but to understand themselves.

So, let the poem lead. Let it stumble. Let it sweat. Let it surprise you. Trust the messy miracle of creation. The words will find their way. And when they do, they’ll carry the unmistakable imprint of your courage, your personal signature, and your willingness to follow your own drummer. 

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Synnika Alek-Chizoba Lofton is an award-winning poet, educator, Pushcart Prize nominee, and publisher. Lofton is the author of more than forty collections of poetry and more than one-hundred and seventy spoken word recordings. His poems have appeared in Clock House Journal, Revenge, UpStreet, Experience Reality Magazine, Quay, Dissident Voice, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Mid-Atlantic Review, and Blue-Collar Review. He earned both a B.A. in Creative Writing and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. He has held teaching positions at Chesapeake Bay Academy, Norfolk State University, Virginia Wesleyan University., and Elizabeth City State University.