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How Poetry Enhances PR Writing

Posted on Apr. 14, 2025  /  Subscribe 0

by Kiran Malik

April is National Poetry Month! My love for poetry began in the fifth grade. I couldn’t tell you who or what inspired it, but I can tell you it started with me writing a bad poem: something about a swallow’s flight, with height and light coerced into rhyming sentences. Like most nice adults my parents and English teacher applauded it. It humored and successfully encouraged the 10-year-old me. A few decades later, my love for poetry only deepened with my journalism, communications and PR career. In fact, if anything, poetry has always helped me keep the sanctity of the written word – the original written word - front and center in a rapidly changing AI world. I’m no Luddite, but art does need to be from the heart. The human heart.

Not so different – PR and Poetry

If poetry is not your cup of tea, you may be hard pressed to see the similarities. This is where I bring an expert. Dr. Heather Sellers, USF Professor of English, has been publishing poetry since 1990 with five published volumes of poetry, and a sixth forthcoming in 2026. &br;

“There are two crucial aspects of poetry that directly inform PR writing: concision and rhythm. In PR, every word counts. Reading  and writing poetry helps you understand how words can create an off-page experience—poetic concision means each word is selected because it contributes more than just one thing to the whole. It’s an art, to be sure, and a powerful one.”

Indeed, brevity and momentum are the anchors of PR writing and poetry with its cadence helps us remember both. While I’m not saying go ahead and quote Emily Dickinson in your next news release (why can’t we pitch “hope is the thing with feathers”) you will be inspired to have punchy copy, given our attention spans nowadays. The art of poetry, as Dr. Sellers mentioned above, smoothens the often mechanical components of PR writing.

Writers are Readers

Writers have to read, there is no debating this fact. As PR professionals adding poetry to your reading line-up will only improve how you approach prose. Dr. Sellers aptly adds the following when I asked her about the edge poets have when it comes to being in the field of communications – tenets she instructs her students in:

“We are readily able to write memorable, effective, sound-rich work in concise packages that create deep emotional resonance. We are going to bring a level of depth and thoughtfulness to our work, along with a bright musicality and attention to installing rhythms (which you probably won’t notice, but they are what make the writing sound good) that help achieve the purpose for any given piece of writing.”

“Anyone trained as a poet, or any other kind of creative writing, is going to have a skillful and professional understanding of audience and purpose, of how to put words together to be most effective for the specific situation at hand. We love language, and that passion, combined with patience, is what makes poets stellar communicators.”

So, celebrate National Poetry Month with Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Agha Shahid Ali, Sylvia Plath, Wordsworth, and Rumi. Or stay close to home with St. Pete’s own Poet Laureate, Gloria Muñoz, and our resident expert, Dr. Heather Sellers. Who knows how you’ll be making your next newsletter story, media advisory or speech better.

Kiran Malik is the senior communications director for the Tampa Metropolitan Area YMCA, and a member of PRSA Tampa Bay's Digital Communications Committee. She is a freelance journalist, an avid reader and a poet, who also loves Netflix (go figure!). 

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