Catherine Garbinsky

It started with a tweet. I asked:

1 - Poets with MFAs & poetry professors: are there specific books (of poetry, on poetry) that you would recommend for writers who may not have access to formal education in poetry?

2- Poets without MFAs — please feel free to add books that have felt pivotal and educational for you in your process. I mean this primarily as a resource and did not mean to suggest that others may not have valuable texts to offer!

Here are some of the responses (I typed up as many as I could, bolded any that I noticed repeated):

Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio’s The Poet’s Companion

Kaveh Akbar’s Divedapper interviews

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook

Writing Dangerous Poetry by Michael C Smith

Creating Poetry by Drury

The Practice of Poetry by Behn

Feeling as a Foreign Language by Alice Fulton

A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass

Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Stewart

Of Color: Poets’ Way of Making Anthology (forthcoming)

De-canon

The Volta

The Alabastar Jar (interviews with Li Young-Lee)

Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonzio

On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell

Fictive Certainties by Robert Duncan

The Flexible Lyric by Voigt

Wislawa Symborska’s “Nonrequired Reading”

The Art of series (especially the Art of Description by Mark Doty, especially The Art of Syntax by Ellen Bryant Voigt)

My Poets by Maureen N. McLane

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The Crafty Poet by Diane Lockward

Wingbeats and Wingbeats II by Scott Wiggerman

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

Picking one poet per year, reading their ouvre and letters (an extremely helpful and nourishing assignment from a genius prof)

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Rigorously study the line, study grammar, and study some kind of oracle system (Tarot, I Ching, astrology, etc) and read as widely in poetry as you can

Poetic Rhythm by Derek Attridge

A Poet’s Guide by Mary Kinzie

The Art of the Poetic Line by James Logenbach

John Frederick Nims’ Western Wind

Poetry: A Writer’s Guide by Amorak Huey and Todd Kaneko

The Making of a Poem (Norton)

Art of Recklessness

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey

Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky

Please by Jericho Brown

Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral

Meadowlands by Louise Gluck

Kinky  by Denise Duhamel

Names Above Houses by Oliver de la Paz

How To Read A Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch

Carol Rumen’s long-running weekly Guardian column

Poetry 101 by Susan Dalzell

Theory of Prose by V Shklovsky

The Art of Attention by D Revell

Structure and Surprise by M. Theune

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

Poems - Poets - Poetry An Introduction and Anthology by Helen Vendler

Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination by Carl Phillips

Upstream by Mary Oliver

The Life of Images by Cahrles Simic

Being Human (anthology)

How To be a Poet

Nine Gates by Jane Hirshfield

Gregory Orr book on lyric poetry

WIld Hundreds by Nate Marshall

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Helium by Rudy Francisco

Wind in a Box (or anything else) by Terrance Hayes

Blud by Rachel McKibbens

Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

Poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Ted Kooser, Pablo Neruda, ee cummings, Charles Simic, Patricia Smith, Dorianne Laux, EB Voigt, Terrance Hayes, John Donne, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound

Read widely. Read more than poetry. Embrace your outsider knowledge.

Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft by Toby Hoagland

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky

A Field Guide to Poetry

Ten Windows by Jane Hirshfield

The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry

The Book of Luminous Things (anthology) ed. by Milosz

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Poets.org and Poetry Foundation websites

Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr

Find or start a writing group!

Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns

American Sonnets by Terrance Hayes

The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner

Poetry Notebook by Clive James

Don Paterson’s 22-page intro to “101 sonnets”

Essays by Barbara Guest

Poetry is Not a Project by Dorothea Lasky

After Lorca by Jack Spicer

The New American Poetry 1945-1960

Helen Vendler’s criticism (The Ocean, The Bird and the Scholar)

Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse ed. By Philip Larkin

The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes

French symbolists

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

The Poets Laureate Anthology

Poet’s House, 92Y Poetry

Singing School by Robert Pinsky

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets by Ted Kooser

Glitter in the Blood by Mindy Nettifee

Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide by Mark Yakich

All the Fun’s In How You Say A Thing by Timothy Steele

The Collected Poems(1856-1987) by John Ashberry

Viper Rum by Mary Karr

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

Rules of the Dance by Mary Oliver

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Jorie Graham lecture On Description (youtube)

Poetry in Theory

How to be a Poet by Jo Bell and Jane Commane (& special guests)

dVerse Poets

Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Furniss and Bath

Poetry: The Basics by Jeffrey Wainwright

The Poetry Handbook by John Lennard

Broken English: Poetry and Partiality by Heather McHugh

The Poem’s Heartbeat by Alfred Corn

Orr’s Primer for Poets and Reads of Poetry

Penguin’s 20th Century Anthology

The United States of Poetry

Staying Alive: real poems for Unreal Times ed. By Neil Astley

Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason

52 Ways to Read A Poem by Ruth Padel

A Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry by David Mason and John Frederick Nims

Projective Verse by Charles Olson

Retrospect/A Few Don’t by an Imagiste - Ezra Pound

Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag

Commonplace Podcast

Headwaters by EB Voigt

Olio by Tyehimba Jess

The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Living and the Dead by Sharon Olds

Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer

The Sin Eater by Deborah Randall

The Art of Poetry Writing by William Packard

The Poet’s Dictionary by William Packard

Freedom Hill by LS Asekoff

Theory of the Lyric by Jonathan Culler

Close Listening ed. By Charles Bernstein

Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary by Frances Stillman

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

The Way to Write Poetry by Michael Baldwin

Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Lofty Dogmas: Poets of Poetics

Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetics by Stephanie Burt

Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes

A poet needs: grounding in verse and rhyme from nursery lines, a grounding in adult poetic diction by the classic poets (of antiquity, late antiquity, then the mediaeval, early modern and modern periods), and their own poetic vision

Pig Notes and Dumb Music by William Heyen

Satan Says by Sharon Olds