November Poetry: A Guide to the Most Underrated Month

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November gets a bad press, and it doesn’t deserve it

Ask most people about November, and you’ll get a sigh. It’s dark. It’s cold, and it’s not quite Christmas yet. The clocks have gone back, and suddenly it’s night at four in the afternoon, and everyone acts like this is a personal attack.

But I want to make the case for November. Properly make it.

November is the month when the world finally stops performing. The showy colours of October are gone. The trees are bare or nearly bare. The light is low and honest. Everything is stripped back to its core, without decoration or distraction. And that kind of radical simplicity, the removal of the beautiful surface to reveal the bare structure underneath, is one of the most useful conditions a writer can be in.

November doesn’t let you hide. It doesn’t give you gorgeous autumn leaves to describe instead of the thing you actually need to say. It sits you down in the grey quiet and waits. And some of the most honest writing of the whole year happens in that waiting.

So yes. November. Let’s go.

What November Carries

November is heavier than it looks, and worth taking seriously.

Remembrance Day, observed on November 11th, is commemorated across the UK, Commonwealth countries, and many parts of Europe as a day of remembrance for those who died in wars. In the US, it’s Veterans Day. The tradition of the red poppy, the two minutes’ silence, the wreath-laying, all of it emerged from the trauma of the First World War, which produced some of the most important war poetry ever written.

In the US, November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to honour the histories, cultures, and living traditions of Indigenous peoples. Native American poetry has a long and rich tradition that is still not nearly widely enough read or taught, and November is a good month to address that.

Diwali, the Hindu, Sikh, and Jain festival of lights, often falls in October or November, a celebration of light over darkness that feels especially resonant in this deepening season. And Thanksgiving in the US, falling on the fourth Thursday of November, brings its own complicated relationship with gratitude, history, family, and national myth.

November is also the month of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, but less well known is that November has its own poetry version. More on that below.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, November is late spring, moving toward early summer. Everything in this post still applies, but it is pointed in the opposite seasonal direction.

Poems Worth Reading in November

November calls for poems that are honest, stripped back, and willing to sit with difficulty. Here are some that do it well.

Wilfred Owen is the essential November poet. His war poems, written during the First World War and published posthumously, are some of the most powerful in the English language. Anthem for Doomed Youth opens with a devastating question about how we mourn the dead. And Dulce et Decorum Est, which ends by naming the Latin phrase “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” as an old lie changed what war poetry was allowed to say. Read both at the Poetry Foundation.

For Native American Heritage Month, look at Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as US Poet Laureate, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and a poet of enormous range and beauty. Her poem Remember is a list poem that builds into something profound and quietly urgent. Her collection, An American Sunrise, deals with Indigenous history, land, and survival with extraordinary power. More at the Academy of American Poets.

Also essential for this month is Louise Erdrich, primarily known as a novelist but also a significant poet, whose work on Ojibwe culture, landscape, and family is deeply rooted and deeply moving. And Tommy Pico, a contemporary Kumeyaay poet whose book-length poems Nature Poem and Junk bring Indigenous experience into confrontation with contemporary queer urban life in a way that is funny, grief-stricken, and formally inventive. More at Penguin Random House.

For the general November atmosphere, consider Ted Hughes’s Crow poems: bleak, darkly funny, mythic, and strange. November is their natural habitat. And Philip Larkin, whose poem “Aubade” we visited in June, has a body of work that suits November perfectly. His poem The Trees which manages to be both despairing and quietly consoling about mortality, is worth reading now. Find it at the Poetry Foundation.

War Poetry and Remembrance

Since Remembrance Day falls this month, it’s worth spending some time on war poetry as a tradition and what it has meant.

The First World War produced an extraordinary outpouring of poetry partly because so many educated young men who might otherwise have become poets were sent to the trenches, and partly because the scale and nature of the suffering demanded new kinds of language. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Edward Thomas didn’t just record what they saw. They broke open the language of heroism and sacrifice to reveal what lay beneath.

Siegfried Sassoon survived the war and became a voice of protest. He actually threw his Military Cross into the Mersey River as a public act of protest against the continuation of the war. His poems are sharp, angry, and often grimly funny in their satire of the home front’s comfortable distance from the reality of the trenches.

Isaac Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish poet from London, died at the Somme in 1918. His poem Break of Day in the Trenches is one of the most quietly devastating in the tradition. Read it at the Poetry Foundation.

More recent war poetry from the Vietnam era, from Iraq, from Afghanistan continues and complicates this tradition. Brian Turner’s collection Here, Bullet is a contemporary reckoning with war that stands alongside the First World War poets in its moral seriousness. More at the Poetry Foundation.

NaNoPoMo: The November Poetry Challenge

NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month gets all the attention in November, but there’s a poetry equivalent worth knowing about.

NaPoWriMo technically runs in April (which we covered then), but many poets run their own unofficial November poetry month challenge, sometimes called NaPoWriMo November or just a personal poem-a-day practice. The Tumblr and Instagram poetry communities, in particular, run November poetry challenges with daily prompts.

The broader point is this: November’s quiet, stripped-back quality makes it an excellent month for sustained writing practice. If April felt too busy or too pressured, November’s different energy might suit you better for a poem-a-day attempt. The darkness and the quiet create a kind of container. You come home, the world outside is dark and still, and the writing feels more natural.

Even if you don’t do a formal challenge, November is a good month to commit to writing something, anything, every day. Not necessarily a complete poem. A fragment, an image, a line that came to you on the bus. Keep a note on your phone. Write in the margins. November is the month for accumulation.

Tips for Writing in November

Here’s what I’ve found genuinely useful this month, still figuring it out.

Write toward the dark rather than away from it. November’s darkness is not a problem to be solved by writing cheerful things. It’s a condition to write into. Some of the most honest poems come from sitting in the grey and writing exactly what it feels like, rather than trying to find the silver lining.

Strip your language back. October lets you be lush and atmospheric. November asks for plainness. Short words. Simple sentences. Direct statements. The bare tree is not less than the tree in full leaf it reveals the structure. Try writing a poem with no adjectives at all. Just nouns and verbs. See what remains.

Write about gratitude, but make it specific. Thanksgiving and Diwali both centre on gratitude this month. But vague gratitude makes weak poetry. Specific gratitude makes strong poetry. Not “I am grateful for my family” but “I am grateful for the particular way my mother laughs when she doesn’t expect to.” The specific is always where the poem lives.

Sit with difficulty. November is the month to write the poem you’ve been avoiding all year. The hard one. The grief, the anger, the fear, the complicated love. The stripped-back season makes it easier to be honest. There’s less to hide behind.

Write in the morning dark. November mornings, when it’s still dark outside, and the house is quiet, have a particular quality of stillness. If you can write in that window before the day starts, in that contained dark you’ll often find something different comes out than in the hours of light.

November Writing Prompts

Five prompts for the month of honest quiet.

Prompt one: Write a poem of witness. About something you saw that needed to be recorded. Not interpreted, not resolved, just seen and held in language. It can be something small and domestic or something large and public. The act of witnessing is enough.

Prompt two: Write a poem with no adjectives. Only nouns and verbs. Let the stripped-back grammar do the emotional work. See how much you can carry with less.

Prompt three: Write a poem of gratitude for something you’ve never thought to be grateful for. A difficulty that taught you something. A loss that changed you for the better. A person who hurt you and, in doing so, showed you something true about yourself.

Prompt four: Write a poem about light in the dark. Not metaphorically, literally. A candle, a screen, a streetlamp through curtains, the first pale light of a November morning. What does light mean when there is so little of it?

Prompt five: Write a poem that begins “By November I was ready—” and follows wherever it goes. Be honest about what this year has cost and what it has given.

Forms to Try in November

November’s stripped-back quality suits forms that do a lot with a little.

The tercet a three-line stanza is perfect for November. Three lines are enough to make a complete thought, an image, a turn. Poems made entirely of tercets have a kind of sparse elegance that suits the bare-tree quality of the month. Try writing a poem in nothing but tercets, no stanza longer or shorter than three lines.

The short lyric is November’s natural form. Not the sprawling ode of May or the long sequence of July. A short lyric, twelve lines or fewer, saying one thing exactly right, is what November asks for. Try writing the shortest poem you can that still feels complete. Then try to make it shorter. The discipline of compression is one of the most valuable skills in poetry, and November is the month to practise it.

And if you want a formal challenge with depth, look at the ghazal again; we’ve returned to it several times in this series. In Persian and Urdu traditions, the ghazal was often associated with autumn and winter, with themes of longing and separation that belong to the darker months. A November ghazal, with its traditional themes of love and loss and the wine of memory, is a natural fit. Try one with the word “dark” or “light” as the radif the refrain.

Native American Heritage Month and Indigenous Poetry

Since November is Native American Heritage Month in the US, I want to focus here, as Indigenous American poetry is a tradition that deserves far more attention than it typically receives outside academic settings.

Joy Harjo is the most prominent contemporary figure. Her three terms as US Poet Laureate gave her a platform that helped bring Indigenous poetry to wider attention. But the tradition runs much deeper. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa novelist and poet, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and was one of the first Indigenous writers to receive mainstream literary recognition. His poem sequences about landscape and ancestral memory are extraordinary.

Simon Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo poet, writes about Indigenous identity, history, and survival with a clarity and directness that is politically urgent and humanly warm. His collection From Sand Creek is a moving meditation on the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo, writes across poetry and fiction about the relationship between land, story, and identity. And Craig Santos Perez, a Chamorro poet from Guam, writes about Pacific Islander identity and colonialism in ways that expand our understanding of Native American or Indigenous American literature.

The First Nations Development Institute has resources on Native American culture, including literature. And the Academy of American Poets has a curated collection for Native American Heritage Month that is a good starting point.

Where to Read and Share in November

The Academy of American Poets has curated content for Native American Heritage Month running through November.

For Remembrance Day poetry, the Poetry Foundation’s war poetry collection is extensive, spanning from ancient times to contemporary poets.

In the UK, the Poetry Society typically has Remembrance Day content and events. The Imperial War Museum also has extensive poetry resources connected to both World Wars, including recordings and manuscripts.

For sharing your own work, November is an excellent time. The community at r/OCPoetry tends to be reflective and engaged in these darker months. Post something you’ve been sitting on. The feedback is often most useful when you’re still close to the work.

And if you’re thinking about submitting to publications, November is a good time to research literary magazines and journals. The Duotrope database is a comprehensive paid resource for finding publications that accept poetry submissions. The free alternative is The Submission Grinder, which is excellent and covers most major publications.

On Writing as a Practice of Attention

I want to end November with something that feels true to the month’s character.

November teaches you to pay attention to small things, because the large things are gone. The blossoms are gone. The leaves are gone. The long light is gone. What remains is the structure of the bare branches against the sky, the particular grey of the morning, the quality of silence after rain.

And what poetry is, at its most fundamental, is attention. The willingness to look at something really look, for longer than feels comfortable, with more honesty than feels safe and then find the words for what you see.

November strips away the distractions and gives you the thing itself. The bare branch. The early dark. The quiet house. The person sitting across from you who you’ve looked at a thousand times and suddenly, in the November light, see differently.

That’s the poem. That moment of suddenly, genuinely seeing.

Joy Harjo wrote that poetry saved her life. Not in a melodramatic way, in the way that paying attention saved her life. The discipline of looking carefully, of finding language for experience, of refusing to let things pass unnamed and unrecorded.

That discipline is available to all of us. November, more than any other month, reminds us why it matters.

Write the bare branch and the early dark. Write the thing you suddenly see.

Happy writing. The dark is the point. Write in it.