The Best Book on Writing Poetry Is...
(My totally subjective opinion on why this book rocks and why I keep teaching it in workshops)
The Best Poetry Craft Book I’ve Ever Read Is…
Dear Poets, We’re fast approaching National Poetry Month. Lots of folks will be sharing their favorite books on how to write poems. My favorite book by far, the book that helped me get my first poems published, and has helped me edit poems for other published authors, the book that made me the poet I am today is…. Structure and Surprise, edited by Michael Theune. I’ll tell you why it helped me become a published poet and why I’ve been teaching it in workshops for over fifteen years.
Based on the Book and Blog, Edited by Michael Theune
Regiser Here
Let’s Get to the Point!
If you know me, you know I can be a bit much. a bit rambly. A bit verbose. A tiny bit distracted. A Pisces, a theater kid, a poet, a woman with a lot of emotions and a really big vocabulary. I tend to fall into the Walt Whitman school of writing. Why write one haiku when you can write all of Western history? Why use one succinct word when you can go to the thesaurus and use ten extra words for free?
Maybe it’s ADHD, a natural lust for life, or an accute awareness of everything going on everywhere all at once. When that movie came out, I thought it was about the inside of my head. When the therapist asks me what I’m feeling, I usually point to every face on the emotion wheel and say, “yes, all the feelings.”
Having a lot going on in the ol’ brain noodle, isn’t totally awful. In fact it’s really great for a poet. Poets use their emotions and observations to make art, generate new ideas, create divergent thinking patterns and share them with others. In order to make those ideas coherent and interesting, however, they need something to contain these ideas - structure.
For a lot of people the biggest challenge is opening up. For me, it’s focusing in.
By some miracle, in my early twenties I took a class with the poet Sally Ashton, who introduced me to the book Structure and Surprise, edited by Michael Theune. Sitting around Sally’s table, talking poetry and studying the book with her and my fellow poets finally clued me in to what I needed most, both in my writing and my life.
I know a lot of people might bristle at the word “structure” because they associate it with rules and authority, things that they are fighting against in their writing! But the secret to good writing, I believe, and a lot of people will back me up on this, is not total freedom. It’s a combination of, as the book calls it, structure and SURPRISE!
Rather than trying to quell any freedom, emotion or power, structure in poetry simply directs, contains, and magnifies it for maximum impact. I think about the metaphor of a river. The feelings, memories, ideas, imagination etc. are part of the water that morphs and moves and flows, but the river banks are what contain and direct its flow, what helps the water get where it’s going into the big vibrant ocean where it can be even bigger and freer!
We’ve all heard that a poem is meant to “move” us, but how does it do that?
I like the metaphor of the river because that’s what rivers do too, they move us from one place to another, one feeling to another, one psychological state to another, one idea to another. But how?
Up until this point my poems had been a lot like the inside of my head—honest, containing big feelings, but also a bit meandering. Sometimes they stagnated and became just a pool of feeling. In fact, a friend once mocked a poem of mine saying “the main message of this poem is just ‘I’m sad, really sad, totally sad.’” And that was it. No greater epiphany. No big revelation about why. No movement.
I turned to the sonnet, which helped me condense big feelings into smaller spaces—fourteen lines, some rhyme and eventually a turn or volta that clarified the message and intent. But this was the 2000s, not the Renaissance. I wanted to be like all the cool poets, doing free-verse, but I still wanted something that could help me condense big feelings into a more focused direction.
Structure and Surprise showed me how to harness the power of my emotions into actual art.
The book is a collection of several essays by modern free-verse poets like Mark Doty and D.A. Powell, who outline the types of form even a free-verse poem can take. It identifies the turning point or “volta” in different types of poems, and demonstrates how the poet arrives at the volta. How it engenders an epiphany. How it creates a satisfying surprise for both the reader and usually the writer too. What it really does is outline the way the mind works to find an answer to a problem, an epiphany. Even in these informal ways, (i.e. structures that don’t use rhyme and sometimes mimic regular human speech) there is a pattern. There is a structure, and this structure leads to, you guessed it, surprise.
Structure and Surprise also taught me how to master my emotions … a little better.
Far from truncating my feelings, it helped me actually grow them more consciously, as a person and as a writer. When I am using the book to help me figure out why a poem isn’t working, it helps reveal my blind spots. To keep going with the metaphor of the river, looking at a structure is like looking at a river basin. Sometimes I see that all the water is dammed up in one place and my work is to clear the blockage. It shows me what areas are getting too much attention, and what areas need to be cleared, and which areas need water directed at them. It shows me channels I haven’t explored and helps me explore them.
Structure and Surprise gave me a sense of mastering my complex, sometimes overwelming feelings so I could turn them into art. In other words, it helped me figure out what the point was in my poems and gave me a very loose map for how to get there.
Of course, it being me, I still pick a lot of flowers and stop to point out a lot of birds along the way.
*One type of structure I haven’t studied yet is the Prose Poem, which is why I am so excited to be taking Jose’s class this Sunday. Let’s learn another form together. Join us!
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