How to Write a Poem

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.

Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. The Question of Address. 2. Viewpoint. 3. The Question of Voices. 4. The Question of Scale. 5. Uses of Repetition. 6. Image. 7. Short Lines. 8. Long Lines. 9. Diction. 10. Uses of Syntax. 11. Tone. 12. Traditional Forms: Ode. 13. Traditional Forms: Epistle. 14. The Question of Background. 15. Conclusion: The Question of Variety. Index

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.

"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