IN THE PALM OF YOU HAND: THE POET’S PORTABLE WORKSHOP

By Steve Kowit

“Ultimately, what you need to do is give yourself permission to write poetry - and to have fun doing it.”

This is a book about getting to the page…

There is something disarming about this book. It doesn’t posture, it doesn’t preach, and it doesn’t try to dazzle you with cleverness. It just gently encourages you to write (and seems to understand why you often don’t).

Steve Kowit writes the way a good teacher teaches – with warmth, humour, patience, and a complete lack of ego. He’s not interested in showing you how much he knows - he’s interested in getting you to the page. He shows us how to get over fear, ceremony or the internal wrangling and flinching that so often gets in the way.

With a series of straightforward exercises and grounded advice, this book is practical - but it’s also surprisingly tender. The exercises are simple, direct, and often playful, but underneath them is a very real respect for the vulnerability of making something and of risking saying what you actually mean. There’s no mystique around poetry here, no sense that it belongs to a special, clever, anointed group. It simply belongs to whoever is willing to show up.

What I love most is the tone of quiet encouragement and the steady, unfussy belief that you are allowed to write - and that you don’t have to be brilliant know what you’re doing. And definitely, that you don’t have to wait until you feel ready. In fact, that waiting is often the very thing that keeps us stuck. I’m coming to realise more and more that I am writing to make sense of my internal world and that’s because I have to, to keep me sane (as nice as the occasional publication is!)

And for someone like me – with a well-oiled inner critic, a tendency towards perfectionism, and a long history of circling the edges of things before finally daring to begin (errrm this website took me five years) – that matters more than any clever technique ever could. If you are a creative and writing starts to feel heavy or performative, this is a book to keep with you. It’s a gentle reminder that writing can be light, exploratory, messy, alive. That it can start small, or badly - or anywhere at all.

“Understand that there is no “correct” way to write - no “proper” attitude, no “appropriate” or “inappropriate” subject matter or writing process. Nor do you need anything in particular to write about, any specific subject or goal. You need not have anything that you are burning to say. All you need is the desire to write - and the courage to begin.”