*A Poetry Handbook:A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver. 1994.

About the Book

Oliver is a contemporary American poet and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I’ve dipped into a number of books that offer guidance regarding reading and/or writing poetry, but this short (~100 page) book is the first to hold my attention until the end. 

The book marches through the preliminaries quickly. A short introduction takes up the question of which aspects of writing poetry can taught, and which cannot. It is followed by very brief chapters, 2–5 pages each, on preparing to write; reading poetry; and imitation as an approach to learning the craft. Then the book turns to a series of topics taken up in chapters (short, if not as short as the first) like “sound,” “the line,” “forms,” “free verse,” and so on. The strength of the book for me, besides its admirable brevity, is that it uses copious examples to illustrate its discussion. This might turn out to be my favorite book of the year, although since we are only a few weeks in that is a bit rash to say. 

Unsystematic Notes

In what follows I will not attempt a tour of the book as a whole, but will just highlight what I found especially apt for my purposes (which, I will say, are not aimed at producing poetry, per se, but rather at strengthening the lyricism in the essays I write). 

Sound

The first two chapters on topics are on “Sound” and “More Devices of Sound.” These, I think, are my favorite bits of the book, both because I learned a lot, and they are as applicable to lyric essays as to poems. Beginning with the observation that phrases have sonic qualities independent of their semantics (‘Hurry Up’ has a different feel from ‘Slow Down”), she then takes an analytic approach, breaking down letters (or clusters of letters) into groups: vowels and consonants; the consonants further divided into mutes (b, d, k, p, q, t, c_hard and g_hard) and semi-vowels; and the semivowels into aspirates (c, f, g, h, j, s, x), liquids (l, m, n, r); and vocals (v, w, y, z).

All this is drawn from an 1860 grammar book that Oliver had on her shelf. The point I take away is not that all of this is hard and fast, but that it is worth paying attention to the “felt quality of sound” that words have. “Hush” (with aspirates) feels different from “Shut up” (with mutes). “Rock,” with its mute ending, feels different than “stone,” with its liquid ending. Then she goes on to look at the role these sounds play in Robert Frost’s Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. I don’t resonate with everything she says about the function of sound in this poem, but it offers, for me, a radically different lens which I hope to apply to my own work. 

The next chapter, “More Devices of Sound,” take up multi-word devices. Alliteration, consonance – where both initial and concluding sounds correspond–and assonance, where the vowels echo one another, as in: 

“and land so lightly / and roll back down the mound beside the hole.” 

The chapter also takes up onomatopoeia, repetition, and rhythm.

The Line: Rhythm, length, etc.

After sound the book turns to rhythm, with the chapter on “The Line,” introducing the notion of feet (stress patterns) and line length. The book argues that the iambic stress patterns is most common in English (and thus other patterns sound more “composed”), and that pentameter (five feet) corresponds most naturally the patterns of speech and breathing (in English), and that use of lines longer or shorter (especially when they are breaking a norm established in a verse) have an impact on the reader/listener. They may at times emphasize particular feelings such as surprise or deliberation, or they may simply, by adding variation, make the verse livelier. But for a line’s length or rhythm to have such an effect, the writing must first establish a norm: Here is what Oliver has to say about the effect of rhythm in general:

The reader, as he or she begins to read, quickly enters the rhythmic pattern of a poem. It takes no more than two or three lines for a rhythm, and a feeling of pleasure in that rhythm, to be transferred from the poem to the reader. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, the sweet grows sweeter. When it becomes reliable, we are in a kind of body-heaven. Nursery rhymes give this pleasure in a simple and wonderful way. 

—ibid., p. 42)  

Oliver also considers different types of rhymes, and the effect of different types of line breaks (enjambment). These topics interest me less as they are not so applicable to essays. Still, one of Oliver’s concluding comments seems worth bearing in mind with respect to how it might apply to an essay:

Every poem has a basic measure, and a continual counterpoint of differences playing against that measure. Poems that do not offer such variations quickly become boring.

—ibid., p. 56

Other Topics, mainly poetic

The next four chapters discuss, respectively, verse; free verse; diction, tone and voice; and imagery. I found these chapters interesting, but not particularly applicable to my ends. The final three chapters return to process – revision; and workshops vs. solitude – and offer a concluding chapter offering Oliver’s thoughts on how to write and live as a poet. Mostly these did not speak to me, though her comment that poems may suffer from having too much – brilliance, or metaphor, or detail, or… – is worth noting. Pictures need frames; gemstones need settings. 

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