11 Books for Getting Unstuck

Poetry essays, exercises, apologias—plus bibliomancy for “receiving” writing advice

I have exciting news to share: You can now read Poet to Poet in the new Substack app for iPhone.

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11 Books for Getting Unstuck

In the many years I’ve been writing and teaching poetry, I’ve amassed an unruly collection of books on the genre—on form, on craft, on exercises, on poetic philosophies, plus poets writing about the work of other poets, etc. 

Those of you who have taken virtual class with me have seen some of these books in presentation slides. Or in the piles on my desk. (This is just a fraction of the mess. I feel no guilt. I will never Marie Kondo my books. And I really tried for an even ten—somehow an eleventh book snuck in.)

When I hit a writing rut, reading actual poetry doesn’t always help. Sometimes it puts knots in my process … like poetry indigestion. In that case, I grab one of these. They remind me why I write as much as about what I might write.

Like Acupuncture for the Mind

As a Zen monk once said to me, “poetry is like acupuncture for the mind.” These books are like acupuncture for my mind when it can’t properly access the flow of poetry.

1. The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation, by Pattiann Rogers.

2. By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, edited by Molly McQuade—a phenomenal collection of writings by women that “explore possibilities in criticism, possibilities in poetry”

3. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine

4. This Art: Poems About Poetry, a Copper Canyon anthology edited by Michael Weigers. 

5. Lake Superior, by Lorine Niedecker—from Wave Books, it includes selections from the poet’s travel journals toward her poem “Lake Superior,” plus related letters, essays, and source materials, from Aldo Leopold to Bashō

6. The Life of Poetry, by Muriel Rukeyser—her uniquely powerful philosophy on poetry’s function in culture

7. The Practice of Poetry, an anthology edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell, a collection of ninety poetry writing prompts

8. What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, by Robert Hass

9. Library of Small Happiness, a collection of essays and writing exercises by Leslie Ullman

10. A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry, by Robert Hass

11. Why Poetry, by Matthew Zapruder—part apologia, part reflection on the author’s own poet-development, all about poetry’s why—“why it is written, and what it does”

Try This: Bibliomancy for Getting Unstuck

Sometimes I practice a kind of bibliomancy — opening at random to a page that “tells” me what I need to know. For example, this morning I grabbed Why Poetry, opened at random to page 167:

“For the Symbolists, describing or interpreting reality was not enough. They wanted to find and create new realities through the poem, as if the poem is a door to a different place. Or maybe a drug. The poem is designed not to be about, but to do. And the power of the poem, the way it locates new realities and changes perception, is through the symbolic reactivation of language, of the word.”

Bam. It was exactly what I needed to hear. Yep, I had lost a sense of the “symbolic reactivation of language.” So, I pressed pause on the drafts I had been working on and wrote something new instead. The new poem was weird. Maybe it won’t work out, ultimately, but at least the language is alive in its strangeness.