June Poetry: Sunlight and New Adventures

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June does something to time

The days are longest. The light lasts until you can’t quite believe it anymore. In northern parts of the world, it barely gets dark at all around the solstice. And somehow that excess of light — all that extra hour upon hour of day — makes time feel both expanded and strangely slippery.

I find June one of the hardest months to write about, and also one of the most rewarding when it works. Because on the surface, it seems simple. Summer is here. Everything is warm and bright and good. But spend a bit of time in it and you start to notice the undercurrents. The solstice is the peak — and a peak, by definition, is also the beginning of the tipping back. The day with the most light is the day the light begins to shorten again. There’s something almost vertiginous about that.

June is also Pride Month. It’s the month of the summer solstice. It’s Juneteenth in the United States. It carries a lot. And the best poetry this month, I think, finds a way to hold both the celebration and the complexity at once.

Let’s get into it.

What June Holds

June is dense with meaning, and it’s worth naming some of it before we start writing into it.

Pride Month is observed globally throughout June, marking the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City. It’s a month of celebration, protest, remembrance, and community. LGBTQ+ poetry has a rich and essential history, and this month is a natural time to read more of it and to think about what poetry has meant and still means to communities whose voices have been marginalised or silenced.

Juneteenth, on June 19th, commemorates the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans in 1865 and is a federal holiday in the United States. Like Black History Month in February, it’s a moment to read and centre Black poets and the long tradition of poetry as resistance, testimony, and joy.

The summer solstice, around June 20th or 21st, is one of the oldest marked moments in human history. Celebrations like Midsummer in Scandinavia and various solstice traditions worldwide remind us that paying attention to the turning of the year is a deeply human impulse. Poetry has always been part of that.

And in the southern hemisphere, of course, June is the winter solstice — the shortest day, the longest night. If you’re reading this from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or South America, June is a completely different poem.

Poems Worth Reading in June

June’s long light and layered significance give you a lot to read toward. Here are some starting points.

For Pride Month, Frank O’Hara is irresistible. His poems are urban, joyful, intimate, and full of the particular energy of New York in the mid-twentieth century. His poem Having a Coke with You is one of the most straightforwardly tender love poems in the English language — and it’s addressed to a man. It’s funny and warm and completely alive. Read it at the Poetry Foundation.

Also essential for June is Adrienne Rich, whose work spans love, feminism, sexuality, and political life across five decades. Her long poem Diving into the Wreck is a masterpiece of sustained metaphor and quiet fury. If you haven’t read her, start there. The Poetry Foundation has an extensive collection.

For Juneteenth and the tradition of poetry as witness, June Jordan is someone I keep returning to. Her poem Poem about My Rights is fierce, personal, and political all at once. It moves from the body to South Africa to systemic violence with extraordinary momentum. Her Poetry Foundation page is a good starting point.

For the solstice specifically, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while not a poem, is soaked in midsummer magic and the way the long light makes ordinary things strange. But for actual midsummer poetry, look at Ted Hughes’s Season Songs, a sequence written for children that works just as well for adults. His June and summer poems capture the season’s full ripeness and slightly overwhelming abundance.

And for something contemporary and queer and formally brilliant, look at Maggie Nelson’s Bluets — a prose poem sequence about heartbreak, colour, and obsession that is unlike almost anything else. More at Maggie Nelson’s page at Wave Books.

LGBTQ+ Poetry: A Longer Tradition Than You Might Think

It’s worth saying explicitly: queer poetry is not a recent phenomenon. It has a history as long as poetry itself.

Sappho, the ancient Greek poet writing around 600 BCE, wrote love poems addressed to women with extraordinary directness and beauty. Only fragments survive, which makes them feel both precious and haunting. Her name gives us the word sapphic, both a description of same-sex desire between women and a specific poetic metre.

Walt Whitman, whom we talked about in May, was writing love poetry addressed to men in the nineteenth century, obliquely but unmistakably. His Calamus poems, collected in Leaves of Grass, are among the earliest examples of queer poetry in American literature.

Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, many of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century were queer, and their queerness is often present in their work even when it wasn’t publicly acknowledged during their lifetimes.

The Academy of American Poets has a curated collection of LGBTQ+ poetry that’s worth exploring this month. And the Lambda Literary Foundation supports and celebrates LGBTQ+ writers across all genres, with a searchable database of published work.

Tips for Writing in June

Here’s what I’ve been finding useful for writing in this particular season, still figuring it out as I go.

Write in the evening light. I mean this literally. June evenings have a quality of light that is genuinely different from any other time of year, that long golden hour that stretches well past eight or nine o’clock. If you can write outside in that light, even just once this month, it changes what comes out. There’s a particular clarity and warmth to it.

Write toward the thing that’s about to tip. June is the peak. After the solstice, everything starts its slow turn toward darker months. That feeling of maximum abundance that is also, quietly, the beginning of loss, that’s rich territory. Try writing a poem that holds both the height of something and the knowledge it won’t last.

Write about love without apology. June, between Pride Month and the general expansiveness of summer, is a good month to write love poems without self-censorship. Write about who you actually love, in the way you actually love them, with all the specific detail that makes it real. Don’t soften it. Don’t make it generic. Let it be particular.

Try writing in response to another poem. Take a poem you love, one from this series or anywhere else, and write a response to it. Agree with it, argue with it, update it, set it elsewhere. This is called an answer poem, and it’s a great way to write when you’re not sure where to start.

Write about joy without guilt. This is harder than it sounds. Many writers feel more comfortable with sadness than with joy, because sadness feels more serious. But joy is a legitimate and important subject for poetry. June gives you permission. Use it.

June Writing Prompts

Five prompts for the longest days of the year.

Prompt one: Write a poem set at a specific time in the evening, 8pm, 9pm, that moment when it’s still light but shouldn’t be. What are you doing? What does the light make you feel? What does it remind you of?

Prompt two: Write a poem that celebrates something or someone you love with complete sincerity and no irony at all. Make it unguarded. Let yourself mean every word of it.

Prompt three: Write a poem about a threshold, a door, a border, a shoreline, or a moment of change. June is full of thresholds: solstice, Juneteenth, and the end of the school year. Pick one and stand in it for a poem.

Prompt four: Write a poem in fragments. Not a continuous argument or narrative but a series of images or moments that belong together without being explicitly connected. Leave gaps. Trust the reader to feel what connects them.

Prompt five: Write a poem that starts: “In June I always think of—” and goes somewhere true and specific. Don’t plan it. Just write the first thing that comes to mind and follow it.

Forms to Try in June

June feels like a month for music, for poems that have a strong rhythmic or sonic quality. Here are a couple of forms that lean into that.

The ghazal returned in March, but June is even better for it. The ghazal’s origins lie partly in the tradition of summer poetry in Persian and Urdu literary culture, and many ghazals explore longing, love, and the sweetness of things that don’t last — all very June themes. If you tried one in March, try another now and see how the season changes it.

The aubade is a form I’ve been thinking about a lot this month. An aubade is a morning poem, specifically, a poem about lovers parting at dawn, or about the sadness of daybreak. It’s an ancient form with roots in Provençal troubadour poetry. Philip Larkin wrote one of the most famous modern aubades, though his is about waking and facing mortality rather than a lover leaving. The form suits June because of all that extraordinary dawn light, in the north, it arrives extraordinarily early. Try writing an aubade this month. Larkin’s Aubade is at the Poetry Foundation.

Where to Read and Share in June

The Academy of American Poets has curated collections specifically for Pride Month and for Juneteenth- both worth exploring this month.

For LGBTQ+ poetry specifically, the Lambda Literary Foundation is the essential resource, offering reviews, essays, and a database of LGBTQ+-published work across poetry and fiction.

The Poetry Foundation’s LGBTQ+ collection is free and extensive, spanning from Sappho to contemporary poets.

In the UK, Out-Spoken Press publishes LGBTQ+ poetry and runs performance events throughout the year, with programming typically active through June.

And as always, r/OCPoetry is there for sharing and feedback whenever you’re ready to show someone your work.

On Writing the World as It Actually Is

I want to end with something that feels especially important for June.

There’s sometimes a gap between the world as it is, in all its beauty and injustice and complexity, and the world that shows up in poetry. A lot of poetry, especially poetry written by people new to it, tends toward the personal and the inward. Which is fine. That’s where it often starts.

But June, with Pride and Juneteenth and the solstice all happening at once, is a good month to ask: what’s happening in the world right now, and can I write toward it? Not in a forced or didactic way. But with genuine attention and honesty.

The poets I’ve found most useful this month, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O’Hara, all wrote from a specific, located self into a larger world. Their poems are personal and political at the same time, not because they were trying to make a point, but because they were paying full attention to their own lives and the lives of people around them.

You can do that too. Write from where you actually are. Write from what you actually see and feel and care about. Let the world into the poem.

The long June light is still there when you look up from the page. Let some of it in.

Happy writing. Stay up late. Watch the light.