Teenage Poems

When it comes to poetry about life as a teenager, there needs to be more than one website or blog article to adequately cover the range of poems available. Perhaps that’s because being a young teenager is filled with highly complicated interactions and events. Coupled with that is the fact that most teenage poets produce some incredibly intense poetry, vivid with raw emotions and glaring detail. Let’s face it, the teen years are when most people deal with some of life’s more trying situations and experiences for the very first time. Many of the problems they face are ‘adult’ in nature, yet they have little to no practical experiences in their past with which to help them make decisions.

The Reality Of Life
by Faaizah

Not all “teenage” poetry has to be as melodramatic as this. One well known poet, Denise Duhamel takes a rather interesting approach to the topic of being a teenager, in her piece Snow White’s Acne. Let’s face it, most of us never considered that any of the classic Disney characters ever dealt with such common teenage problems as acne. Duhamel, who is an American poet and literature professor, takes a rather charming approach to a sensitive teenage problem, putting some humor and lightness to it all.

Snow White’s Acne
by Denise Duhamel

Poetry really does serve as an opportunity for teenagers to grow and mature, offering ways to be expressive as they grow into adulthood. Many teens find that poetry, or writing in general, is an excellent tool for collecting their ideas and hodge-podge of emotions and expressing them as insightful proverbs and tales. These pieces of youthful thoughtfulness serve not only the teen, but the rest of us as well, as they express some of the wisdom that exposes itself during the teen years. Some of the dramatic scenes that teenagers face are represented in the poetry that they write, and these writings serve as a reasonably accurate indicator of how they will handle future problems and what kind of adults they will become. It helps them to take the lessons which they have learned to become much stronger when presented with future tests. The expressiveness that is found in the poems they write can serve to help us understand them better — and ourselves, as well. Regardless if it is joy or despair, love or anger, many teenagers find poetry to be a safe-haven to work through their thoughts and feelings. It helps them to gather together various emotions and thoughts and use ink and paper as a sort of filter for evaluating their accomplishments and lessons learned, which they will take with them into their adult years.

this feeling
By Shelby Key

Teen poetry can be rather intense, to say the least. But when you consider the value of the lessons learned and the amount of hard work and emotional energy required to produce such expressive works, it become quite evident that teenagers are much more mature then we give them credit for . . . and they themselves become rather surprised as they, too, realize the level of maturity which they possess.