Every Poem is a Revelation

Poetry is more than just a craft, a medium — it’s a way of being. “Everything feeds the art,” says writer Jasmine Khaliq. Her philosophy is that interesting poetry is born from an interesting life, and she’s committed to living as fully as possible. Jasmine’s next poem might be in the melody of a song, a conversation with a stranger, or the traces of a dream. Her writerly duty is to remain open to it all, absorbing as much as she can as she traverses her inner and outer worlds. 

“Everything ends up speaking with each other,” Khaliq continues. She craves novelty because every experience unlocks an entirely new realm of artistic possibility. While the raw material of life is already infused with special significance, its meaning shifts with context. When two moments are combined in just the right way, something transcendent emerges: emotions swell, ideas unfold, and unlikely connections form. Poetry’s capacity to surprise in this way is precisely what drives Jasmine: “I want to think something new, or recognize something old anew.” Writing is an exploration, and every poem is a revelation.

In the beginning, though, everything’s vague — nothing makes complete sense. Jasmine explains that her poems first manifest as “half an idea, a couple of lines, a certain feeling and image.” She writes not because she already has an end in mind, but because she wants to discover what that end might be. 

Jasmine embarks on that search for meaning by putting pen to paper. She’s an avid journaler, and her poems often originate in her handwritten diary entries. Her stream of consciousness is a fierce current, a flood of memories and emotions that gush onto the page. The key, for her, is tapping into that flow state and inhabiting it long enough to release all the material welling up inside her. 

The writerly life, then, thrives on extremes. It’s filling the cup until it spills over, and then some; it’s complete catharsis. All art, though, requires some degree of focus, which demands discernment. For Jasmine, this means distinguishing between herself and the poem’s speaker, finding her voice amidst her own. While similar, they’re never quite the same. The speaker is the one who utters the unexpected, urging Jasmine towards the unforeseen discovery at the heart of the poem. 

Jasmine’s diaristic style produces deeply personal poems that illuminate the most intimate corners of her life. For her, poetry is, above all else, a mode of expressing her own unique set of experiences. She doesn’t overwhelm herself by trying to tackle grand thematic ideas because she trusts that the universal will seep through the personal. Khaliq remembers someone she misses, for example, as “funny and stern.” She continues, “after he passed away, I stood in front of the corner store he’d take me to when I was a child, devastated to realize the store had burned down and that I was unaware of how long ago it had happened.” 

While brief, Jasmine’s description expertly distills an immense grief even without addressing it outright. As Emily Dickinson advises, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Approach lofty subjects at an angle — subtly, indirectly. By honing in on the details that make her experience of grief distinctly her own, Jasmine illustrates exactly how an abstract concept takes concrete shape in her world. She transforms the ineffable into something tangible, conveying a truth so specific that it becomes, paradoxically, expansive.

Poetry, Jasmine proves, is a kind of alchemy. It’s not just about words themselves, but about what they can capture, what they’re able to evoke. The poet uses language to transcend it, spinning something eternal from the ephemeral, conjuring both the intimate and infinite. It’s the evidence of a full life, marked in equal measure by love and loss, heartache and ecstasy. And when all of it rises to the surface — the unsaid, the half-remembered, the almost-true — Jasmine lets loose. 

“You have to write a poem,” she insists. “And you do.”