Augsust Poetry: A Guide to the Last Full Month of Summer

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August feels like a long Sunday afternoon

You know that specific feeling. It’s still light. Everything is technically good. But there’s something at the edge of it, a faint melancholy, a sense of time running out, an awareness that this particular thing won’t last much longer.

That’s August. All month.

In the northern hemisphere, August is still summer on paper. The schools are out. People are still on holiday. The days are warm. But the light is doing something different from what it did in July. It’s golden in a way that’s almost too much. The evenings are shortening noticeably. You begin to see the first leaves unfurling on certain trees. Summer is still here, loudly and fully, but you can feel it starting to think about leaving.

That feeling, presence, and impending absence all at once is one of the most poetic emotional states there is. August is the month of beautiful endings. And beautiful endings, it turns out, produce some of the best writing.

What August Carries

August is quieter in terms of formal cultural observances than some months, but it carries its own weight.

In the United States, August 26th is Women’s Equality Day, marking the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It’s a good moment to read feminist poetry, and there is a rich, long, contentious, brilliant tradition of it to explore.

In many countries, August is the height of the festival season. In the UK, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, runs through August, with a significant spoken-word and poetry strand. If you’re anywhere near Scotland, or even following it online, the Fringe is worth your attention. Check the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme for spoken word and poetry events.

In the Southern Hemisphere, August is late winter, edging toward spring, that first feeling of warmth returning, the earliest flowers, the world beginning to stir. If you’re reading from there, you’re experiencing your own version of March’s themes, and the prompts and ideas below apply just as much from that angle.

August is also when many students, at school and university, start thinking about returning. That transition, that end of one chapter and beginning of another, is worth writing about.

Poems Worth Reading in August

August calls for poems that understand endings, nostalgia, and the particular sweetness of things that are almost over.

John Keats’s To Autumn is the poem for this time of year. Yes, it’s technically an autumn poem, but read it in late August, and it fits perfectly, it’s about the very moment before the turn, the fullness that is also a farewell:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run…”

It’s one of the most sonically perfect poems in English. Read it slowly and out loud. The full poem is at the Poetry Foundation.

For something more contemporary and surprising, try Wisława Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet whose work combines philosophical depth with a completely dry, almost deadpan wit. Her poem “View With a Grain of Sand” explores how we project meaning onto a world that doesn’t know we’re here. It’s funny and vast at the same time. More of her work is at the Poetry Foundation.

For feminist poetry and Women’s Equality Day, Adrienne Rich came up in June but deserves returning to. Also essential is Muriel Rukeyser, whose work spans labour rights, war, gender, and the body with an extraordinary range. Her poem Käthe Kollwitz is a meditation on art, women, and political life that still feels urgent. Find her work at the Poetry Foundation.

And for the particular August feeling of nostalgia and time passing, look at Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate, whose work is accessible, often funny, and quietly devastating in equal measure. His poem Nostalgia gently mocks our tendency to romanticise the past while also completely understanding it. Read it at the Poetry Foundation.

On Writing Endings

August is a good month to think about how poems end, both literally and as a subject.

The ending of a poem is one of the hardest things to get right. Too neat, and it feels like a conclusion that ties everything up when the poem should be staying open. Too abrupt, and the reader feels cheated. The best endings do something unexpected with what came before; they reframe it, extend it, or leave a gap that the reader has to fill.

Seamus Heaney talked about the way a good poem ends with what he called a “click”, a final line or image that locks into place and suddenly makes everything that came before it feel inevitable. You’ve probably felt that reading poems, even if you didn’t have a word for it. That small internal shock of recognition.

Try this: go back to a poem you’ve written this year, any month, any poem, and look at how it ends. Does it end too early? Does it go on too long? Does it end on an abstract statement when a concrete image would be stronger? Would it be better with the last line cut entirely?

Often, the real ending of a poem is hiding one or two lines before where you actually stopped.

Tips for Writing in August

Here’s what’s been working for me this month, still very much a learner.

Write toward the bittersweet. August specialises in it. The thing that is beautiful and almost over at the same time. The last swim of summer. The final afternoon of a holiday. The end of a friendship, a job, a chapter of life. Write toward the feeling of almost-gone rather than actually-gone.

Pay attention to light. August light in the northern hemisphere is genuinely extraordinary, that warm, amber, slightly melancholy quality it takes on. Try writing a poem that is entirely about light. Not about what the light falls on but about the light itself. Its colour, its angle, what it does to ordinary things.

Write about something you’re leaving behind. August is full of endings and departures. Something ending for you this summer, a place, a habit, a version of yourself. Write about what you’re leaving and what you’re taking with you.

Go back to unfinished work. August, with its slightly slower pace, is ideal for returning to poems you started and abandoned earlier in the year. Give them another look. You might find that one of them is actually much closer to finished than you thought.

Write a bad poem on purpose. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s genuinely liberating. Sit down and write the worst poem you can. Make it clichéd, obvious, forced. Lay it on thick. Then read it back, and you’ll often find, buried inside the deliberate badness, one or two genuine lines. And you’ll feel the fear of writing badly start to loosen.

August Writing Prompts

Five prompts for the long, golden, slightly melancholy end of summer.

Prompt one: Write a poem about the last day of something. Not the day after, the actual last day while you were still in it, not knowing or knowing it was ending. Let the poem stay in that moment without resolving it.

Prompt two: Write a poem about light. Specifically, August light, or winter light if you’re in the south. Where is it coming from? What does it land on? What does it change about the things it touches? Stay entirely in the visual.

Prompt three: Write a poem that is an inventory. Everything in a specific room, or bag, or drawer. Let the list of objects tell a story about a person without describing the person directly. Objects carry lives. Let them.

Prompt four: Write a poem about something you used to believe that you don’t believe anymore. Not something dramatic, something small. A childhood assumption, a received wisdom, a thing you took for granted. What changed?

Prompt five: Write a poem that starts with “By August—” and follows wherever the phrase takes you. Let it be specific to this year, this summer, this version of you.

Forms to Try in August

August’s mood suits forms that work with endings and return.

The elegy came up in May, but it’s even more at home in August. An elegy doesn’t have to be about death; it can be for anything that’s passing. A summer. A version of yourself. A friendship that’s changed. Try writing an elegy for something small this month. The form gives you permission to grieve things you might feel silly grieving otherwise.

The terza rima is a form worth trying this month. It’s the form Dante used in The Divine Comedy,interlocking three-line stanzas with a chain rhyme scheme (ABA BCB CDC and so on). The way each stanza reaches forward into the next creates a feeling of inevitability, of being pulled along, that suits poems about time passing. You don’t have to be as ambitious as Dante. Even three or four stanzas in terza rima is a worthwhile exercise.

The envelope poem or frame poem is a structure where the poem begins and ends with the same image or line, but the image means something different by the time you return to it. Think of it as going on a journey and arriving back at your starting point changed. Try it this month: begin with an image of late-summer light, travel through a memory or feeling, and return to the same image at the end. It will mean something different. It always does.

The Edinburgh Fringe and Performance Poetry

Since the Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs through August, it’s worth saying a bit more about spoken word and performance poetry, because it’s a very different animal from page poetry, and it’s worth experiencing if you haven’t.

Spoken word poetry is written to be heard rather than read. The line breaks are breath. The rhythm is physical. The performance is part of the poem. Some of the most exciting poetry happening right now is in performance, in slam competitions, at open mics, and at festivals like the Fringe.

In the US, the national slam poetry community is vibrant and accessible. The Poetry Slam Inc. website has resources for finding slam events near you. The annual National Poetry Slam is a major event worth following, even just online.

In the UK, Apples and Snakes remains the leading organisation for performance poetry, with events running nationwide.

For YouTube, Button Poetry is one of the best channels for contemporary spoken word, the Button Poetry YouTube channel has thousands of performances and is one of the most joyful rabbit holes in poetry. Start anywhere.

And if you’ve only ever read your poems on a page, August, with the Fringe as inspiration, is a great month to try reading one out loud to another person. Just one poem. Just once. See what it feels like.

On the Poetry of Nostalgia

I want to spend a moment on nostalgia specifically, because August tends to produce a lot of it, and it’s worth thinking about carefully as a writing subject.

Nostalgia is tricky in poetry. It’s one of the easiest emotions to write badly about, all soft focus and golden light and things-were-better-then. That kind of nostalgia produces greeting cards rather than poems.

But the best poems about the past are not comfortable. They look clearly at what actually was, including the complicated parts. They notice what the memory is doing, how it’s selected, softened, revised. They hold the sweetness and the loss together without letting one cancel out the other.

Billy Collins does this well; he knows he’s being sentimental and makes that self-awareness part of the poem. Sharon Olds does it differently; her earlier poems are unflinching in their specificity, refusing to smooth anything out.

When you write about August memories this month, try to resist the softening instinct. Keep the specific detail that’s uncomfortable as well as the detail that’s lovely. The combination of both is what makes a poem about the past feel true rather than merely pretty.

The past was complicated. Let the poem be complicated too.

Where to Read and Share in August

The Academy of American Poets archive is particularly good for reading in August, there’s no specific monthly theme, which means you can follow your own instincts. Search by emotion, by subject, by form.

The Poetry Foundation similarly has an enormous browseable archive. August is a great month to just wander through it without an agenda.

For spoken word specifically, the Button Poetry YouTube channel is endlessly good. So is TED’s playlist of spoken word performances, which includes some of the most-watched poetry performances of the last decade.

And for sharing your own work, r/OCPoetry is always open. August is a good moment to share something you wrote earlier in the year and have been sitting on. You’ve had distance from it. It might be ready.

On Getting to the End of Summer

Here’s the thing about endings. They clarify. When something is almost over, a summer, a year, a period of your life, you start to see it more clearly. You notice what mattered. You notice what you’ll miss. You notice what you’re actually ready to let go of.

That clarity is poetic material. Some of the sharpest, most honest writing happens right at the edge of things, in the last days of summer, in the week before everything changes, in the moment when you can feel something ending, and you’re still inside it.

August is that moment. The long Sunday afternoon of the year.

Don’t waste it trying to hold summer in place. That’s not what the poem is. The poem is in noticing it leaving: the specific golden light, the cooling evenings, the particular smell of the air shifting. The way everything is still here but already, quietly, becoming a memory.

Write that. Badly or well. Now, while you’re in it.

It won’t look like this again.

Happy writing. Watch the light. Let the summer go.