small step

Poet, all those primers and guidebooks will only take you so far.

bad map

We can’t expect the poem to be a guidebook, think of it as more like a badly drawn map.

beyond all that

Very little of what is in a grammar book or a style guide makes any difference to a poet.

bible thumper

A Bible-thumping formalist, he pounded on his Big Book of Forms. [Thinking of Lewis Turco]

obscure constructs

Another guidebook chockfull of obscure constructs for one’s amusement.

against guidebooks

Do we need another guidebook to tell poets what blank verse is or how many stresses are in a pentameter line? Because most poets can’t access the sources of their art, they write books that lapse into nomenclature and technical know-how. The best books about poetry, however strained and inarticulate, are those that try to explain what it takes to create a poem from the experiences of one’s life within the world in which one lives.