Writing Poems (7th Edition)

WRITING POEMS by Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace, 6th ed., offers clear advice, appropriate examples, and stimulating suggestions for creating poems. I recommend this text to advanced poetry students who have had at least one semester of creative writing. R. S. Gwynn's Poetry: A Harper Collins Pocket Anthology would complement this text in a junior-level college poetry writing course.

I took an advanced poetry course from Michelle Boiseeau who taught from this text. She was enlightening, helpful, and inspiring. The book was more so.

I re-read the book after taking the course and found it even more helpful in reflecting on the course.

Michelle Boisseau is one of our most talented and hard-working poets. Her approach is as clearly revealed in this book as any poet could hope to impart.

Don't read this book expecting to come out a poet, but read this book and plan on learning a great deal about the process of writing poetry.

I have a previous edition of this book which I've really enjoyed, but something seems to have washed out of this current offering. The book is dedicated to Robert Wallace, who died during the compilation of edition #4, and I'm wondering if the book didn't go to press in a daze. This edition seems slicker, perkier, and less succinct than it's siblings. Still useful and nutritious but in that low-salt, high-fiber way that I don't want my poems or books about poems to have. My suggestion is to try an earlier edition.

In my daydreams, every poet has read this book (edition #2 I can vouch for), as well as the books "Western Wind" and "In the Palm of Your Hand" and gorgeous, flexing poems are lying about everywhere. It could happen.

This is the WORST textbook I have ever read, from its simple- and literal- minded deconstructions of great poems soiled by the dim illuminations of them, to its muddled explanations of prosody and poetics. There are far better books out there for the aspiring poet. Try "Writing Poetry" by Barbara Drake; "The Art of Poetry Writing" and "The Poet's Dictionary" by William Packard; "The Book of Forms" by Lewis Turco; "Thirteen Ways Of Looking For A Poem" by Wendy Bishop; and before all these others you must read "Letters To A Young Poet" by Rilke (translated by Herter Norton).

I have taught this book in its various editions in the Writers' Program at UCLA for many years. It is simply the best textbook I have ever found to demystify poetry and inspire would-be poets. Not only is the text clear, cogent and lively, but the examples of poetry used -- from Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love" and Norman Dubie's "A Blue Hog", to Yusef Komunyakaa's "Sunday Afternoons" and Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of the World" (plus classics such as W.C. Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken") -- are uniformly first rate. If you want to learn how to write poetry well and do not live near an urban writing center, you can do no better than to buy this book.