A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry

A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry guides young poets toward a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in their lives, while also introducing the art in an exciting new way. Structuring the presentation from life toward art, Orr urges poets to “turn worlds into words” and then give those words a dramatic structure.Using such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the Primer encourages young writers to approach their “thresholds”—those places where disorder meets order, where shaping imagination can turn language into urgent and persuasive poems. It provides poets with a dozen focused writing exercises and explains essential topics such as the personal and cultural threshold, the four forces that animate poetic language (naming, singing, saying, imagining), tactics of revision, ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry, and how to locate and learn from our personal poetic forebears.