A Poetry Handbook
A Poetry Handbook:
A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry
© 1994 by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver published her first poetry collection, Voyage, and Other Poems, in 1963. Since then, she’s published more than 20 books of prose and poetry. She’s won several awards including a 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, and more recently the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, in 1992. She’s earned praise from many. Her poems, renowned for their poignant illustration of the natural world, are lovely and evocative. They entreat you to attend to nature and ponder the deeper, broader implications they bring closer to focus.
With the same adeptness, she turned her skill to writing a handbook for the genre she’d commanded for more than thirty years at the time of it’s publication.
You can’t Teach Someone to be a Poet, Can You?
No, but you can teach the skills, and impart some understanding. I consider it poetry theory, like music theory. Learning these can free you from mundane, trite expressions and empower you to make calculated leaps bolstered by understanding.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
GETTING READY
READING POEMS
IMITATION
SOUND
MORE DEVICES OF SOUND
THE LINE
SOME GIVEN FORMS
VERSE THAT IS FREE
DICTION, TONE, VOICE
IMAGERY
REVISION
WORKSHOPS AND SOLITUDE
CONCLUSIONPermissions Acknowledgments
Index
In the introduction, Mary Oliver stated that she hoped to have her book be a good beginning. She accomplished this and something more, impeccably. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry is a book “about the things that can be learned.” It’s an overview that touches key areas of poetry including tone, rhythm, meter, style, how to read poetry, imagery and much more. Take a look at the book contents listed above. We learn enough to become competent students of poetry, and to know what more to ask. Further, she points us in the direction of particular poets to read for examples of writing styles.
Why it’s Important to Study
Mary Oliver is a world class, Pulitzer prize winning poet. Her understanding of the craft is transmitted clearly in her prose. So, is it any wonder, her poetry handbooks are used in classrooms; at least, it is at the University of Houston. She presents details on the forms of poetry in clear prose, and brings home her points with examples of poems from poets, well-known and not-so-well-known.
On pages 2-3 of the Introduction, Oliver explains part of the importance of studying the craft of poetry. She likens it to learning the skills of any artisan discipline, like painters and musicians. Of writing without studying, she says:
“…the student falls into a manner of writing, which is not a style but only a chance thing, vaguely felt and not understood, or even, probably intended…After four or five poems, he or she is already in a rut, having developed a way of writing without ever having the organized opportunity to investigate and try other styles and techniques.”
Oliver goes further to predict that there may come a time when the writer’s work will require something new, a precise skill with manipulating their verses. In this situation the writer get’s stuck and doesn’t know how to revise his work, “…the poem fails, and the writer is frustrated.”
What can You Learn about Poetry?
Oliver’s handbook is full of the lovely language she is known for. Her assessments are evocative, stimulating, inciting my own desire to write better. On page 72, she talks about free verse using William Carlos Williams and his poem The Red Wheelbarrow. “This eight-line poem has passed through endless scrutiny, and still it refuses to give up all its secrets. But it does tell us a great deal.” At more than one point, I found myself thinking, “I want to be able to do that.”
This poetry handbook contains gems that illuminate Oliver’s points. The something more that I got from this handbook was a pleasant surprise: I experienced renewed appreciation for the art. Not something I would have expected from a How-to book.
The chapter Diction, Tone, Voice is full of clear explanations of the contemporary poem. Oliver tells us that tone is to be created deliberately, just as is the choice of words used. She includes one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, and her poem, i’m accused of tending to the past… Also included is Workday by a poet I don’t know, named Linda Hogan.
In the chapter on Revision, we are told that in order to adequately revise your own work, you need to sever your ties to the words written. This is the same in other writing as well. The reason to separate is so that you can see that useless parts for what they are and delete them.
From the outset, Mary Oliver’s appreciation for training and form are clear. She shares with us that it’s important to be deliberate in your actions, to have control over every aspect of your poem. However, Oliver adds, if we must choose between formal training and reading, reading is the better choice. Nearing the end of the book, she touches on workshops again, stating that they can provide writers with tools, advice and feedback.
It’s important to understand that the writing from writing class is often mechanical, not-quite-art stuff, expectedly so. Still, writing from class, imitating, is a viable learning too. And follows this with what I consider to be a gem of an insight into workshops. It’s something I didn’t consider, and was not in a workshop setting long enough to have experienced this. And yet it made perfect sense as soon as I read it. She tells us:
“The risk of the workshop is that it is necessarily composed of a group of persons and it therefore cannot avoid certain patterns of social behavior.”
She explains that the danger inherent in this setting is that if you’re not careful, you may find yourself writing and presenting to group, work that will get you accepted and applauded–work not truly expressive of your ability.
The conclusion of the chapter, The Line, is toward the middle of the book. This was another opportunity for me to be riveted by her turn of phrase. Mary Oliver brings home the importance of variation in line formation. Without variations poems can lose your attention. She says, “The gift of words–their acute and utter wakefulness–is drowned in a rhythm that is too regular, and the poem becomes, instead of musical, a dull and forgettable muttering.”
Conclusion
Mary Oliver’s book is a great guide that will stick with me, and be kept close at hand. Her Permissions Acknowledgments area is a goldmine of poets to explore. And finally, her Index makes this short handbook a really convenient reference tool. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry should be on the shelves of high school and college students, adults and eighth graders alike. Really, it’s for anyone inclined to get a real feel for the magic that is involved in the craft and the art of poetry.
It’s quite possible this book will stand the test of time, like Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. It was published in 1934. Or, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. Pulling from Wikipedia, this book was first published in 1919, revised in 1935 and again, by E. B. White for publication in 1959.
The reason I chose this book is because I have enjoyed Mary Oliver’s poetry for quite a while now. I wanted to get more insight into the theory of poetry and writing and reading poems. And, when a friend told me that he read her one of her prose books in his poetry class, it seemed like a good choice, and it was!
If you should read the book, please come back and share your thoughts in a comment. Or send me an email.
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