March: A Poetry Lover’s Guide to the Month of Change

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March is the month that can’t make up its mind

And honestly? Same.

One day it’s bright and almost warm, and you think: yes, this is it, spring is here, everything is going to be fine. The next day, there’s sleet. The day after that, you’re in a t-shirt again. March is moody, unpredictable, and just a little bit exhausting.

But here’s the thing. That instability — that constant shifting between states — is one of the most poetic conditions there is. March is the month of thresholds. You’re not quite in winter anymore, but you’re not fully in spring either. You’re in between. And if January taught us that in-between feelings are where poetry lives, March is basically a two-hundred-mile stretch of prime poetic territory.

This month I’ve been reading poems about transformation, hope, growth, and the complicated feeling of things beginning again. And I’ve been thinking about what it means to write through change rather than waiting for things to settle down first. Because spoiler: they don’t settle down. March is the proof.

What Makes March So Ripe for Poetry

Across almost every culture and tradition in the northern hemisphere, March marks a turning point. The spring equinox falls around March 20th — the moment when day and night are equal lengths, and after which the light starts winning. That’s a genuinely powerful thing to sit with.

In Persian and Iranian traditions, Nowruz- the Persian New Year- falls on the spring equinox and is among the oldest celebrations in the world, dating back over three thousand years. Poetry is central to Nowruz, and the poet Hafez is a particular touchstone. Families traditionally open their collected works at random and read the poem they find as a kind of forecast for the year ahead. That’s a beautiful way to think of poetry as something alive, relevant, and personal.

In many European and Celtic traditions, March 1st marks the first day of spring. In Wales, it’s also St David’s Day, a celebration of Welsh identity with deep roots in bardic poetry — Wales has one of the oldest living poetic traditions in Europe.

In the southern hemisphere, of course, March is the beginning of autumn. That flipping of the seasons is worth thinking about too — it’s a reminder that the same month means completely different things depending on where you’re standing.

All of this is to say: March is a month full of activity. There’s plenty to write about.

Poems Worth Reading in March

Let’s start with the obvious. Spring poetry in English is a rich and ancient tradition, and a lot of it is genuinely gorgeous rather than cheesy.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is someone I came to late and now can’t stop reading. His poem Nothing is so Beautiful as Spring opens with this:

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush…”

The sound of that line – the alliteration, the rhythm – is doing something extraordinary. Hopkins invented a technique called sprung rhythm, which tries to capture the natural patterns of speech and movement. Even if you never write anything like it, reading Hopkins teaches you what language can do when it’s really pushed. Find more of his work at the Poetry Foundation.

For something more grounded and contemporary, Seamus Heaney is hard to beat for poems about the physical world and the act of change. His poem Digging – technically about watching his father dig in the garden — is really about inheritance, craft, and how we find our own way of doing things. You can read it at the Poetry Foundation. It’s a brilliant poem to read if you’re thinking about your own writing practice.

On the Persian poetry front, Hafez (also spelt Hafiz) is extraordinary. His ghazals — a poetic form with ancient roots in Persian and Arabic literature – are full of spring imagery, wine, roses, and a kind of ecstatic longing that somehow feels very contemporary. A good starting point is the translations by Daniel Ladinsky, though it’s worth knowing that those are loose interpretations rather than strict translations. The Academy of American Poets has a useful introduction to Hafez.

On the Ghazal- a Form Worth Trying

Since we’re talking about Hafez, let me say a bit more about the ghazal, because it’s a form I’ve recently started playing with and it’s genuinely brilliant.

A ghazal is a poem made up of couplets, each of which is complete in itself – almost like a string of separate moments rather than one continuous argument. The last line traditionally includes the poet’s own name, like a signature. There’s also usually a refrain at the end of each couplet.

The rules are specific but not impossible. And the form has been taken up by English-language poets in really exciting ways. Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, is largely responsible for bringing the ghazal into contemporary English poetry, and his collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight is a wonderful place to start. His poem Even the Rain is a good introduction to the form and what it can do.

The point is: March is a good month to try a new form. Something about the season of change makes it easier to try something new in your writing, too.

Tips for Writing in March

Here’s what I’ve been finding useful this month, still very much as a learner rather than an expert.

Write toward something rather than about something. March is directional — everything is moving toward spring. Try writing a poem that has that same sense of motion. Start somewhere cold or dark and move toward light. Not in a cheesy way, just structurally. See if the poem feels more alive for it.

Use the senses you forget about. March has a very specific smell, that particular damp-earth, something-waking-up smell after rain. It has sounds, too: birds growing louder, the wind changing quality. Sight is the sense most poems rely on, but smell and sound can be far more emotionally immediate. Try writing a poem that doesn’t describe anything visual at all.

Try writing in a new form. Take the ghazal, the sonnet from February, or even just try a haiku sequence, three or four connected haiku that together build something larger than each one alone. Constraints push you somewhere you wouldn’t go on your own.

Write about what’s growing. Literally or metaphorically. What’s coming back to life in your own world right now? What are you hoping for? What feels like it might be about to change? March is asking these questions, whether you write them down or not. You might as well write them down.

Let your first draft be a mess. This is always true, but especially in March when there’s so much to say. Get it all down first. The editing is a different job. Don’t do both at once.

March Writing Prompts

Five prompts for a changeable month.

Prompt one: Go outside and find something that is in the process of changing — a bud, a puddle drying up, a building being worked on, a patch of mud becoming grass. Write a poem about being caught mid-transformation.

Prompt two: Write a poem from the perspective of something that only exists for a brief season. A snowdrop. A frost. The last cold morning before the warmth comes. Let it speak.

Prompt three: Think about something you’ve been carrying through winter, a worry, a hope, an unfinished thing. Write a poem about putting it down. Or about not being able to.

Prompt four: Try a short ghazal. Write five couplets. Choose a simple refrain, a word or short phrase that ends each couplet. Don’t worry about whether it’s technically perfect. Just fill out the form.

Prompt five: Write a poem that begins with the word “still” and let it mean two things at once. Still as in quiet. Still, as in continuing. See where that double meaning takes you.

Poetry and the Natural World

March tends to draw many people toward nature poetry, and I think that’s worth leaning into rather than resisting, even if it feels too obvious.

The tradition of nature poetry is one of the oldest and deepest. But what makes the best nature poems great is not that they describe flowers nicely. It’s that they use the natural world to say something true about human experience. The daffodil is never really just a daffodil.

Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is the classic example – a poem that uses a field of daffodils to describe how memory and beauty sustain us through difficult times. But it’s also worth looking at less well-known nature poets. Alice Oswald, a contemporary British poet, writes about rivers, seasons, and the natural world in a way that is anything but conventional. Her long poem Dart – about the River Dart in Devon, is genuinely unlike anything else. More at the Poetry Foundation’s page on Alice Oswald.

In the US, Gary Snyder has spent decades writing poetry rooted in ecology and the natural world, influenced by both Zen Buddhism and his life in the Sierra Nevada. His work is a reminder that nature poetry can be rigorous, political, and deeply grounded all at once. Start with his page at the Poetry Foundation.

Where to Read and Share in March

The Academy of American Poets continues Poem-a-Day through March, and their April programme ,National Poetry Month in the US- is worth knowing is coming. If you’re planning to write more in April, March is a great time to start preparing.

In the UK, March often sees poetry events linked to spring arts festivals. Apples and Snakes runs performance poetry events across the country. The Poetry Society also runs its annual young poets competition with March deadlines most years, worth checking if that applies to you.

For international readers, the Poetry Archive has an enormous collection of recordings and is particularly good for discovering poets whose names you might not have come across yet. It’s a brilliant thing to have on in the background while you’re doing something else, you can just let the poems wash over you.

And if you want to find events near you anywhere in the world, Eventbrite often lists open mic and poetry nights locally, and a search for “poetry open mic [your city] March” will usually turn something up.

On Writing Through Change

I want to end with something that feels very March to me. The idea of writing through change, not waiting until things have settled, but writing in the middle of the mess.

Many people feel they need to fully understand something before they can write about it. Like the poem has to be the conclusion of the feeling rather than part of the process of figuring it out.

But some of the most alive poetry I’ve ever read was clearly written in the thick of something. Not with the benefit of hindsight, but right in the muddy middle. You can feel it. The uncertainty is in the poem. The not-knowing is part of what makes it true.

March, with all its inconsistency and transition and sudden brief warmth and then sleet again, is the perfect month to practice writing in the middle. Not summing up. Not concluding. Just noticing what’s happening right now, in this particular in-between moment, before it shifts again.

Write that. The in-between. The not-yet. The almost-but-not-quite.

That’s where March lives. And honestly, that’s where some of the best poems live, too.

Happy writing. See you on the other side of the equinox.