How To Write A Poem

In How to Write a Poem, poet John Redmond challenges our sense of what is possible within a poem. Setting aside the vexed question of what poetry is, he replaces it with the more helpful and exciting question: what might poetry be? By focusing on the future of poetry in this way, he affirms that a poem may take a new shape or behave differently to previous poems. The book acknowledges that to have a sense of what a poem might do, we must first see what other poems have already done. Redmond pays attention to traditional forms, such as the ode and the epistle and and to issues like syntax and diction, but focuses on the fundamental principles of poetic construction: who is speaking and to whom? Where is the speaker located? And why does their speaking take this form? Such questions encourage readers to experiment with poetry, and to create something fresh.

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.