A POETRY HANDBOOK: A PROSE GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING AND WRITING POETRY
By Mary Oliver
“Writing a poem…is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen.”
This is a book about writing (and reading) poetry…
Many of us are probably familiar with the incredible poetry of Mary Oliver. If you aren’t, I would suggest starting with the poem ‘Wild Geese’ and letting these lines sink in:
‘You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.’
In this short, matter-of-fact and easy-to-read handbook, Mary Oliver covers the basics of writing poetry - from rhyme and metre, to sound and imagery, to tone and voice. But she also unpacks why these things are important to the listening mind. Drawing on the the work of poets such as Robert Frost, James Wright, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Bishop, Oliver unpacks all aspects of craft, guiding us towards a better understanding of the foundations and fundamentals of poetry and what this means for our own writing. There is also a brilliant chapter on ‘Revision’ - and how important this is for the poet, revealing that she usually revised through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before she felt content with it (imagine! Mary Oliver!):
‘Have some lines come to you, a few times, nearly perfect, as easily as a dream arranges itself during sleep? That’s luck. That’s grace. But this is the usual way: hard work, hard work, hard work. This is the way it is done.’
She also underlines the importance of committing to writing poetry above all else - revealing her belief that there is a body of work waiting to be made into tangible form, but only for and through the people who continue to show up:
‘Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself—soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly or it will not appear at all. Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime…For the would-be writer of poems, this is the first and most essential thing to understand. It comes before everything, even technique.’
For those interested in writing poetry and are looking for a broad and applicable understanding of the craft, this small but mighty book is a great place to start.