How to Write a Poem - (How to Study Literature) by John Redmond (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An innovative introduction to writing poetry designed for students of creative writing and budding poets alike.

• Challenges the reader's sense of what is possible in a poem.
  
• Traces the history and highlights the potential of poetry.
  
• Focuses on the fundamental principles of poetic construction, such as: Who is speaking? Who are they speaking to? Why does their speaking take this form?
  
• Considers both experimental and mainstream approaches to contemporary poetry.
  
• Consists of fourteen chapters, making it suitable for use over one semester.
  
• Encourages readers to experiment with their poetry.

From the Back Cover

Through a series of chapters designed as useful provocations, Redmond steers readers away from the 'default contemporary poem', urging fresh ways of thinking, insisting on 'the promise and opportunity of the blank page'. Traditional chapter topics like the sestina and the sonnet are abandoned in favour of more inspiring themes like variety, scale and background.

The book drwas on a wide array of examples, from sixth-century Ireland to contemporary Poland, and diverse cultural analogies from baseball to film. Rather than thinking of poems and having meanings, the book suggest that we should think of them of being like plays, or computer games, as experiences designed for the reader's benefit.

Review Quotes

"John Redmond's "How to Write a Poem" contains no false notes. He does not patronise his reader with easy examples or workshop games, but lights on his subject with elegant pragmatism and humility. His overall argument arises from a very personal yet wholly professional sense of poetry as an art form in practice, and his examples are informed by deep reading and writerly intuition. I consider the book a small masterpiece of clarity, economy and experience. It brings light to poetry as something made: something real and realised." David Morley, Warwick University

"The examples throughout the book are contemporary and provocative in the most helpful sense. ... [Redmond] clearly loves poems, enough to show you in detail how they work." Poetry News

About the Author

John Redmond is the author of one collection of poems, Thumb's Width (2001), which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and he features as one of 'The New Irish Poets' in a Bloodaxe anthology of that name. He was previously Assistant Editor of the long-running poetry magazine Thumbscrew, and writes reviews on a regular basis for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and Poetry Review. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and, previously, was Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.