The young poet confronts issues like sexism, gender-based violence and Islamophobia on Instagram and in her performances around Washington, D.C.

The simple answer to why I started writing poetry is that I have a lot of feelings and I needed somewhere to put them.

The longer answer is that I was always a good writer. English was my favorite subject and words of affirmation are my love language. I call myself a logophile: a lover of words. If you mix the love of language with my incessant need to talk about feelings, it’s easy to see how poetry became the most natural (and cheapest!) therapy for me.

Poetry is self-expression but it’s also the expression of other people’s experiences. I don’t write only about myself and I certainly don’t write only for myself. The idea that I can tell stories that both belong to me but will also compel other people to talk about their own stories, feelings and emotions is what drew me to poetry.

I write both stage poetry and page poetry. What that means is that some pieces are spoken-word poems that are meant to be performed while others are meant to be read. There’s often an overlap between the two but I can usually tell which kind of poem it’s going to be as soon as I sit down with the idea. My writing process for page poetry and performance poetry starts out relatively the same. I get inspired when I’m out and about so I’ll jot down a string of words or a fragment of a sentence on the Notes app on my iPhone so that I don’t forget it. Later, I’ll sit down with a pen and a journal to handwrite. I work through whatever I wrote down on my phone and kind of stretch out that idea as much as I can. I scribble things down, edit and revise. After that, the page poem is done and it looks nothing like what it looked like in my head or on the Notes app. I love seeing the evolution of a poem on paper.

For performance poetry, this is when I start thinking about volume, tone, pauses, body language, facial expressions and eye contact. Spoken word is my favorite kind of storytelling because poetry began as an oral tradition. Audiences are only going to hear the poem once so I have to make sure I’m telling the story in a way where they'll feel it deeply enough to remember it on their drive home. Every sound and every silence is vital when telling a story; I have had listeners remember the exact moment of a poem where I took in a deep breath. I rehearse all of it — even the parts of a poem where I’m quiet. Every part of the poem is performed with intention.

“As a South Asian, Muslim woman standing in venues in the nation’s capital [Washington, D.C.] with a microphone in my hands, it would be a disservice to the woman I am, the women I come from and the women who will one day come after me not to speak out and write on issues like gender equality.”

— Amara Chaudhry

When I first started, people recommended writing about the things I know — things I am comfortable with, familiar with, that I am sure of. But that didn’t work for me because I am most inspired by the things I don’t quite understand yet, the things that confuse me and the things I am trying to figure out. For me, a lot of that has been sexism, misogyny, gender-based violence, navigating the diaspora, exploring immigration and surviving Islamophobia. As a South Asian, Muslim woman standing in venues in the nation’s capital [Washington, D.C.] with a microphone in my hands, it would be a disservice to the woman I am, the women I come from and the women who will one day come after me not to speak out and write on issues like gender equality. It is part of the fabric of my story and I have to tell it in order to make sense of it myself and to force other people in the room to think about it for the four minutes that I’m on stage or the 30 seconds I have their attention while they scroll through Instagram. I believe that art is political and the poetry that makes people uncomfortable is the poetry they take home with them.

In that same breath, I also write about love, heartache, God, grief and healing. Writers of color are often expected to write only radical, revolutionary poems to be taken seriously. Not only is that incredibly unfair, but it would also be dishonest. I do my best to be truthful in my writing about my current season of life and sometimes that means 10 feminist poems and other times that means 25 poems with the same metaphor about the moon — so be it.

Social media has been the backbone of my pursuit of poetry. I started by writing my poems on the Pages app on the iPhone, adding a signature at the bottom, taking a screenshot and uploading them as photos on Instagram. And somehow, the simplicity of that worked for that time and people shared my work with their friends and followers. Now, I’ll handwrite some poems on paper with floral designs or use ProCreate on my iPad to create a more visually appealing presentation of the poem. Writing is still my main focus but I think creating and preserving aesthetics have become a huge part of social media. Artists of any kind are forced to keep up with that. I also think handwritten poetry on ordinary, unremarkable objects like paint swatches or dinner napkins or a bathroom mirror is really beautiful so I like to play around and see what works.

Sharing my work publicly has been the most brave and bold thing I have ever done. I don’t think people realize the courage and difficulty in it. Most people don’t even talk about their feelings out loud, so for me to write mine down in ink for everyone to read is terrifying. I’m always worried that people will forget that the poem is just a window — that there is so much more to me and to every story and it isn’t all shared on stage or on the page. But despite all of that, I’ve never regretted it. Sharing my poetry changed my life. It made me less shy. It allowed me to meet people I otherwise never would have. It taught me how to better cope with anxiety, anger, grief.

With that, I want to share with you six of my poems. As I said at the start, I have a lot of feelings. Here are some.

(Courtesy of Amara Chaudhry, illustration by Ghonva Ghauri)

Amara Chaudhry

is a Pakistani American poet based in Washington, D.C. When she’s not writing poetry, she is usually reading it. And if she’s not doing that, she’s probably watching “The Bachelor.” Follow her on Instagram.