Poetry as self-expression and self-understanding

Poetry as self-expression and self-understanding is a practice Hannah Baker describes as a way to explore emotion and, sometimes, discover what she has not yet been able to say directly. Its ambiguity makes room for several meanings; its act of composition gives feeling a form. But the episode of her poem also complicates that promise: what becomes a private route toward self-knowledge can be taken, printed, and mocked by other people.

Ambiguity and the Reader’s Work

Hannah is drawn to poetry because an abstract poem can sustain uncertainty. A word may act as a symbol, participate in a hidden metaphor, or simply be the word the poet chose; red, for instance, might suggest blood, anger, or desire, or it might be red because the sound suited the poem. Poetry is not a code with one guaranteed answer. It asks the reader to bring knowledge of life and emotion to the words while admitting that an interpretation may remain incomplete.

That openness begins as a reading practice Hannah had to learn. Someone taught her to approach poetry as a puzzle, deciphering its language in light of what the reader knows. The method does not eliminate uncertainty; it makes uncertainty productive. A poem can mean more than its writer consciously intended, and interpretation may disclose something the writer has not recognized in herself.

Writing as Emotional Practice

The same person who helped Hannah appreciate poetry also showed her the value of writing it. She presents the poem less as a report that must name the source of an emotion than as a form that can carry the emotion itself: anger can be written as an angry poem without directly describing its cause. The writing gives feeling an outlet without requiring immediate explanation.

Hannah also proposes reading one’s own poem as though it had been found in a textbook, without knowledge of its author. That distance can make the results surprising and frightening, because the writer becomes a reader of her own language. For a time, she wrote poetry rather than seeing a therapist. She does not claim that poems solve everything: when her account turns to her reliance on them, Clay Jensen wonders whether a therapist might have helped. The contrast keeps poetic practice meaningful without presenting it as a substitute for every kind of support.

Hannah buys a spiral notebook to gather her poems in one place and, a couple of days each week after school, goes to Monet’s to write one or two. Her first attempts seem straightforward and sad to her, though she thinks some work fairly well. One early poem stays in her memory: it imagines love as an ocean without land, a desert of sand, a star whose light fills the night, and a force that gives the speaker wings. Hannah teases the poem as greeting-card material, but its remembered place in the notebook shows how writing can persist beyond the moment of composition.

A Poem Becomes a Mirror

The practice of interpretation becomes personal when Ryan Shaver discusses one of Hannah’s poems. She had partly joked and wanted to see what a teacher might expect students to discover, but Ryan identified a meaning she had not found for herself: the poem was not about her mother or a boy, but about Hannah. In his reading, she had written a letter to herself inside a poem.

Hannah’s first response is physical and emotional resistance. She flinches, grows defensive and angry, then feels scared and sad at the interpretation. Ryan’s explanation is that she had used her mother as an excuse, writing as if her mother failed to appreciate or accept her when the words should have been addressed to herself. The boy in the poem, too, represents Hannah. Ryan’s reading recasts the poem’s apparent address to other people as a sign of how Hannah herself was overlooking her own needs and identity.

Hannah later accepts that Ryan had found something real, while insisting that the poem went much deeper than his explanation. Its meaning is therefore neither wholly hidden from its writer nor exhausted by another reader’s interpretation. The poem enables recognition, but does not reduce Hannah’s experience to a single deciphered message.

Privacy, Exposure, and the Tapes

The possibility of discovery has a painful counterpart. Hannah asks Ryan why, after calling the poem scary, he stole her notebook, printed the poem in the Lost-N-Found, and let others read, dissect, and make fun of it. The notebook that had held poems written privately after school becomes a means of public exposure. The episode distinguishes interpretation offered in a conversation from circulation that removes the writer’s control over where her words go and how other people treat them.

Hannah’s account of the poems also sits within the larger act of telling her story. She calls the audiotapes a form of poetic therapy: like the poems, they give shape to emotion, but they carry her account to other people. As she narrates, she says she is discovering things about herself and about her listeners. Poetry’s movement from feeling, to words, to interpretation thus echoes the tapes’ movement from Hannah’s voice to an audience—while the violated notebook shows that being read can expose as well as reveal.