The Poet's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Fleshing out the bones of poetry
Review: "It is the form, the shaping of the language, which makes the poetry endure." That, to my way of thinking explains what poetry -- and poets -- are all about. "Poetry requires more showmanship than honesty." Those statements are in a chapter titled "From sighs and groans to art."

It's this kind of cutting to the chase (or, in business terms, bottomlining) that makes Jerome the guru of contemporary poets-in-training. He simply tells it like it is.

In "Well of English Undefiled" Jerome discusses the English language and what it means to the poet. "One thing a poet learns," he writes, "is that there is no such thing as a synonym. Each word has irrepressible individuality." Finding which word is right for your poem involves much more than knowing definitions. It also involves understanding the impressions words make.

This is a book for all poets. The material in this book will revive you, sharpen your intellect and your skills, help you merge mechanics with art to create enduring and memorable poetry.

If you buy only one manual about writing poetry, make it this one. You won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: Certain things worth learning
Review: A fairly ample volume on technique. The poet wishes urgently to impress upon the reader of his Handbook that, yes, despite what you may have heard, there is technique involved in writing poetry; that most poetry is metrical, and rehearsed. It is not, he says with some asperity, a matter of spontaneous effusion.

The late Mr Jerome seems to have been a man with a salutary skepticism about the fashionable, to the point of being sharp and even sarcastic. Jerome is a formalist, as is every poet when you come right down to it (a poet is someone who makes, who is concerned with form, who shapes the language; and the most resolute of anti-formalists has an obsession with form, is perhaps more vexed by the problem of form than your average metrician). Jerome is blunt in this book. He shows us an excerpt from the work of Paul Blackburn, and gives us his verdict that it is forgotten as soon as it is read. He asks whether a poem by Denise Levertov -- not one who fought shy of the unconventional line-break -- wouldn't have been better off as a single-paragraph prose-poem. He rearranges Amy Lowell, and concedes that his rearrangement can't really help matters.

Oh, yes -- what, pray, do you imagine Judson Jerome's attitude toward E. E. Cummings was? He seems to have been quite "pro." Jerome insists, rightly, that in his most radical rearrangements of type, Cummings was not casual and not "spontaneous." He governed his language quite well ... and, Jerome reminds us, Cummings wrote many sonnets -- and verse as intricately metrical as anything by Sidney or Herrick.

The Poet's Handbook is no mere reactionary protest or polemic against the Beats (or against what Donald Hall has called the McPoem). It's a positive and salutary reminder that poetry is a craft, that it is conscious, that it is art and artifice. That although we are all poets in a certain sense (whether we make metaphor as adults or babble sounds for our own pleasure as children), there are certain things that can be learned, and are worth learning.

Addendum : Mr Jerome identifies the meter of W. H. Auden's early poem "Petition" as accentual tetrameter. We disagree; it is consistent and correct iambic pentameter.

Rating:
Summary: Simply the best.
Review: For many, poetry is a purely subjective art form, impossible to judge and critique. Unfortunately, most people write terrible poetry. For the rest of us, there's Judson Jerome's impeccable handbook. Taking the view that poetry is a mechanical skill much like pottery, Jerome gently but facilely teaches how to construct a poem that *works* -- that is credible, accessible, and accomplishes what its author had in mind. This is very much a nuts-and-bolts book. It does not take the view that poetry is mystical or spiritual, thankfully (I'm sure there are dozens of books that'll offer that). Instead, it teaches the language and technique skills one needs to make poetry that isn't embarassing or fruity.<