“How to grow your own poems” by Kate Clanchy (Picador, 2020)

A poetry workbook which also addresses practical and psychological inhibitors.

I like the first exercise - some poems are presented, templates are abstracted from them, and the reader is invited to fill them in given the right amount of help. The aim is to show how life's details (that the reader might have dismissed as unpoetic) can be added to poems - a good way to tempt people in. The examples are mostly list poems. Some results are shown, written by youths.

She warns people not to use rhyme initially ("because they are rare, rhymes in English are loud"). She points out that it's ok to borrow in some way from other poems - "Poetry, in short, until very recently, was a varied, noisy, general conversation, not a silent solo art form. It's easier to join in a conversation than it is to make a speech". She points out that "Poets are very drawn to [gerunds]. They do nice poetic things. They still the action. They suit a contemplative turn of mind. They rhyme (with each other). They give you an iambic (ta-tum) beat. But they can also have a cloying, clogging effect" (p.58)

After lists, she looks at voltas between lists. She's keen about involving the five senses, about using concrete rather than abstract nouns. Throughout the book, many of the poems use anaphora.

She writes "Personally, I have never seen the point [of syllabics]" (p.153) and "Most published contemporary poets, though, don't just use conventional punctuation at all times, but are quite obsessed with it" (p.164)

I think the only poem that doesn't demonstrate the point she's trying to make is "My Beast" - she writes that "the square stanzas ... trap us in a regular shape" but the lines don't all have similar lengths, and 2 of the stanzas are run-on.

I noticed

• "Love like Windows 95/ The greatest, most user-friendly Windows of them all/ Those four little panes of light/ Like the stained glass of an ancient church/ vibrating in the sunlit rubble/ of the twentieth century" (from "Love comes back" by Hera Lindsay Bird)
• "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver
• "Not the furniture game" (Simon Armitage) has many good images
• "That landing strip with no runway lights/ where you are aiming your plane,/ imagining a voice in the tower,/ imagining a tower" (from "My heart" by Kim Addonizio)
• "Chair" by Sally Davis
• The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls ... Your dead friends passing/ through you like wind/ through a wind chime" (from "Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong)

I think the book's prime audience is [teachers of] people new to poetry - many beginners' errors/assumptions" are directly challenged, and the "fill in the gaps" approach to writing provides an easy route in. I suppose the number of list/anaphora poems is a consequence of this accessibility.

Other reviews

• Teo Eve (more suitable for beginner poets than anyone already well-versed in the form)
• Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
• Harry Cochrane (Generally, though, there is very little holding forth across the book’s seven chapters, which share a broadly similar structure. Here’s a poem; here’s what it’s doing; here’s a prompt; now it’s your turn. ... As a primer, the book is still a little too primary school, appealing to our poetic instinct but to none of our curiosity. It makes no apologies for its classroom origins, however, and in the classroom it will find its true calling.)