You are invited. And the party is all about your words: how to find them, express them, and perfect them.
Of course there is no formula for writing a poem. If poems came with instructions like IKEA® coffee tables, we’d all be missing the point. But this book will give you some strategies—some tools, if you will—to assemble your personal, imaginative raw materials. These strategies are focused primarily on free verse (for a comprehensive look at “form” poetry, which is one tried-and-true way you can start a poem, I recommend The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms). Yet, many of the concepts can also be applied to form poetry, at both the inception and revision stages.
Each chapter will introduce and model, through several drafts of the same sample poem, a concept you will explore in your own draft. You will continue to reshape your poem from chapter to chapter, ending with a thorough revision. And then you can start again with a new poem. Write and repeat. These are poetry-crafting strategies for life.
How to Write a Poem is written as a companion to How to Read a Poem, which uses Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” as a guide for enjoying poems. Like How to Read a Poem, this book is organized by chapters inspired by stanzas from Collins’s poem. While the two books work well together, they also function independently. (Do keep in mind that the best poets spend at least as much time reading and absorbing poems as they do creating their own.)
Your words are waiting. Are you ready to begin?