Jane Draycott reviews How to Write a Poem by John Redmond

Search for poetry 'how-to' books in any online bookstore and you'll find at least half a dozen published within the last ten years, all full of memorable nuggets of understanding, technical tips and writing exercises designed to illuminate some of the more accessible reaches in what Don Paterson has called the dark art of poetic composition. The best and most popular of these read with the all the immediacy, anecdote and practical guidance of a live workshop, and continue to receive close and grateful attention from succeeding waves of aspiring writers. Now John Redmond's How to Write a Poem aims, according to its cover, to 'set aside the question of what poetry is and think about what poetry might be', urging potential writers to forget their preconceived ideas about what a poem should be, and consider instead the possibilities for what new thing it might become.

His first proposition is that new poets should avoid what he describes as the default contemporary poem - rooted in the pervasive culture of self-expression - in favour of a more open-ended and unpredictable endeavour:

Readers of this book are encouraged, literally and metaphorically, to look at the world upside down, to have minds which misbehave ...

There are those who might argue that in the handbook field, 'How To Write Good Poetry' belongs on the same shelf as 'How to Turn Water into Wine'. Redmond's project though is aimed at emerging poets whose aim is not necessarily solely to write the prize-winning poem, but rather to enter into conversation with 'what poetry has been' in a spirit of fresh exploration, with the contingent hope that resulting new work 'may take a shape not assumed before, may not behave as other poems have behaved'. This to me sounds like an excellent ambition, indeed the holy grail.

At the heart of this book is Redmond's emphasis on the reader's experience, and on several important relationships - the relation between writer and potential reader, between poem and reader, between writer-as-writer and writer-as-reader, between the poetry of the past and the poetry not yet written. Each chapter provides a close study of several models to demonstrate some of the many ways a poem might pitch into life in terms of such aspects as address and viewpoint, scale and voice, background and variety. The 'assignment' with which each section then closes is designed to lead the potential poet from models to original work. One of the great pleasures of the book is the lively variety of Redmond's examples and references (my favourite is Miroslav Holub's 'I must state that I have never felt anything like creativity and, even if I had, I would not be caught dead admitting it').

More concerned with possibilities for imaginative content and development than with technique at phrase or stanza level, How to Write a Poem is not designed as a nuts and bolts guide, though the author has many valuable ideas to offer in passing by way of rules of thumb. One of the best chapters is that on the relation of differing scales, which writers frequently explore as a key dynamic yet is rarely touched on in how-to books of this kind. Other good sections are those on tone and diction, as well as the two chapters on line-length.

Published in Blackwell's 'How to Study Literature' series, Redmond's approach is a little reminiscent of my own first poetry bible, Miller & Greenberg's Poetry: An Introduction, a guide designed for students of literature rather than apprentice writers. But any academic texture in Redmond's explorations to which some readers may be sensitive is far outweighed by his clarity and conviction about the imaginative process. For the careful reader who takes him up on his suggested assignments, I suspect there will be much in the book's approach as well as its detailed content which will serve well to fine-tune their reading, as well as bearing fruit in their own apprenticeship in this dark and slippery art.

 

How to Write a Poem (Blackwell Publishing, £8.00)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.