April is National Poetry Month. To mark the occasion, we spoke with several USC faculty members who are published poets about what inspired them to pursue poetry.
For some, poetry starts in a classroom. For others, it begins with a song lyric, a written line or something from a book. The love of poetry doesn’t follow a defined path.
For Ray McManus, an English professor and interim executive associate dean at USC Sumter, that openness is what makes poetry so powerful. “Poetry gives people an opportunity to come together, read something and feel,” he says. “History teaches us facts, while poetry teaches us to feel.”
An unlikely path to poetry
Ray McManus didn’t grow up surrounded by poetry. Raised in rural Lexington County, he didn’t
see poetry as a job people did, let alone something you could build a life around.
“I didn’t think about poetry in high school,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily know someone could be a poet for a profession.”
Music first grabbed his attention, including lyrics, storytelling and the meaning behind the words. “I was hoping to write a song,” he says. “Instead, I ended up writing poems.” McManus went on to attend college, eventually transferring to USC, where he was encouraged to take a poetry workshop. That sparked something deeper. Poetry became a way of understanding the world.
For Ray, poetry is a way of making sense of things that often feel senseless, giving him control over things he otherwise can’t control. His work draws heavily from his lived experiences, including growing up in the rural South, navigating working-class identity, masculinity, parenthood and relationships. But his goal isn’t just to tell his story. It is to appeal to a universal experience others have also faced.
“We have all been rejected; we’ve all failed,” he says. “I try to find that central thing and speak to it in a way others can connect to.”
Finding meaning in words
For Ed Madden, poetry wove itself into his life through a lifelong fascination with language.
“I’ve always loved language, how words work, what they can do,” says Madden, Carolina Trustees Professor of English Language and Literature. Over time, poetry became a way to process and reflect, even if his early attempts weren’t great.
“I wrote really bad poetry in high school,” he says. “But that training in processing things through charged language stayed with me.”
Madden’s career has since evolved into a hybrid of scholarship, creative work and public engagement. His academic work, grounded in Irish literature, has shaped his ear for sound and narrative. His time as Columbia’s poet laureate pushed him to think beyond the page and consider accessibility and audience.
He often starts his poems with an impulse, something that needs attention. Yet, the work is never truly finished.
“I change things even after I publish them,” he says.
He often returns to recurring questions in his writing, what he describes as obsessions, including social difference, a longing for community and questions about whose voices matter.
Finding poetry in the everyday
For English professor Sam Amadon, poetry was something shared among friends.
“We were just messing around with it,” he said. “And I ended up liking it.” That openness still defines much of his work today. He writes about daily life, including seasons, family and moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. His most recent work includes sonnets shaped by raising young children and living through the pandemic. At the heart of his process is reinvention.
“I’m always looking for new ways to write,” he says. “New forms, new approaches. That’s part of what keeps it alive.”
Breaking misconceptions
McManus, Madden and Amadon all love poetry — but they know there are misconceptions about it that can keep others from exploring it.
“People think they don’t understand a poem,” Amadon says. “But that idea gets in the way of actually experiencing it.”
Madden challenges a different assumption, that poetry is simply about emotion. “Poetry is not just raw emotion,” he says. “It’s about language.”
McManus adds that many people encounter one kind of poem and assume it represents the whole. “There’s one poem in an ocean of poems,” he says. “If you find something you like, let it open a door.”
Poetry in a digital world
In a fast-moving, digital world, poetry offers something increasingly rare: a moment to slow down.
“We need moments where we put our phones down,” McManus says. “We need something that makes us pause.”
Ed Madden sees that same urgency for poetry as a response to a world shaped by speed, algorithms and constant noise.
“Poetry is about slow reading,” he says. “About paying attention. About seeing what language can do and how it does it.”
Amadon notes the tension between poetry’s online presence and its traditional form.
“Poetry is very shareable online,” he says. “But the experience of reading a poem
on a page is irreplaceable.”
Together, their perspectives highlight poetry’s unique role. It can exist in both digital and physical spaces while still offering reflection, empathy and connection.
Why poetry matters
Poetry isn’t confined to a single experience or background. It can illuminate moments of uncertainty and discovery and weave itself into friendships, scholarship and community engagement.
That sense of connection extends beyond campus through programs like Split P, which sends MFA students into Columbia public elementary schools to lead workshops in poetry and fiction. The program allows graduate students to share their passion for writing directly with young students, fostering creativity and connection within the broader community.
How poetry can affect us varies for every person — but for everyone, it offers a space to feel and to connect.
For McManus, the takeaway is simple: “Poetry saved my life.”