Mary Oliver’s Tips For Writing Poetry
Lessons from her Poetry Handbook
When I walked into my local bookstore and stumbled across this thin, tangerine and cream-colored guide, I was immediately compelled to buy it. I didn’t bother flipping through the pages. I knew Oliver’s name from her poetry collections Upstream and Dream Work. Her poems are sharp and read like illustrations, and I thought back on how her poems made me feel as if I were devouring each word and savoring their cadence. I wanted to learn how to better harness my words to paint vivid pictures in my readers’ heads the way she’s done for me. I knew Mary Oliver would be a fine teacher.
I knew this handbook would be a great source of knowledge on meter, classical forms, diction, etc. But this book offered so much more than assistance in form. It was a rich meditation on how poetry shapes the mind and vice versa.
Here are a few of the lessons I learned from her Handbook:
1. The form may change, but the need for poetry does not.
“None is timeless: each arrives in a historical context; almost everything, in the world, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it-indeed the world’s need of it-these never pass.” (Oliver 9)
