"How to be a poet" by Jo Bell and Jane Commane (Nine Arches Press, 2017)

Not the details on how to write sestinas, etc., but how to develop one's writing and career; how the book/magazine world works. The book is useful for both new and experienced writers. For new writers it should help to demystify the poetry world, showing that poetry's not all magic, divinely inspired. I think old hands will find the checklists useful. The book's written mostly by Bell and Commane. They don't always agree on issues, and there are guest writers - Joelle Taylor, Mona Arshi, etc.

• p.23 - "Patagonia" by Kate Clanchy is looked at in a way I found useful, showing how a typical fiction reader might need to adjust their expectations.
• p.39 - it says "It is okay to not write, too." I'd be tempted to push that idea further, asking readers "Why do you write poetry?" "Is poetry the best way to achieve those aims?" "If you give up writing for a week, what do you most miss and what sort of text do you write first?"
• p.47 - Jane Commane writes "I was unfortunate several years ago to be in receipt of some bad advice about my writing ... For more than three years I wrote little poetry, and lost faith in almost everything I had ever written ... I'd been reading and editing manuscripts for several years by this time, as well as teaching workshops and mentoring poets"
• p.54 - Among the features to check for in one's poetry - "Abstract nouns", "Poetricks" like 'gossamer', etc - I'd add several more trendy poetisms.
• p.54 - "Line breaks are not a substitute for punctuation" - yes, but looking at published poetry it's easy to think otherwise.
• p.56 - "A few years ago there was a sudden outbreak of couplets in journals and competitions, because it so happened that three shortlistees in the National Competition had written in couplets"
• p.58 - "most poetry is broadly autobiographical" - yes. Which is rather a shame.
• p.62 - I like Jo Bell's write-up of how/why she revised a poem. I think I prefer the earlier draft overall. I think successive drafts of a poem aren't necessarily attempts to "improve" the work. I think it's more like evolution - the changes aim to improve the chances of the piece succeeding in some particular environment. What audience is expected to receive the work?
• p.77 - Robert Peake writes that in poetry he "rediscovered a means to engage the complexity of human experience in its own terms" and on p.88 he writes that "the only criterion for success in my daily writing practice is that I keep doing it". More than any other writer in this book, I think he has views that differ from mine.
• p.117 - "many a poet has made their way by piling up a considerable CV of individually published poems. Some book publishers like to see this before they consider a poet ready to publish a collection. I personally see this as kind of old school and suspect many of the newer generation of small press editors feel the same" (Clive Birnie). I've seen this opinion before, and can to some extent understand it. If someone quickly writes a bunch of good, related poems why should they have to wait years to get them published in magazines first?