Before I start, I'll point out a much more extensive set of recommendations from a much more authoritative source -- a series of articles entitled O Body Swayed to Music by R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah magazine, in which he reviews about 20 books on poetry reading and writing.
But here are some of the books I've found useful.
How Does a Poem Mean?, by John Ciardi and Miller Williams (Houghton Mifflin, 1975), A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver (Harcourt Brace, 1994) and Making Your Own Days, by Kenneth Koch (Scribner, 1998) are all good introductions to the elements of poetry (metaphor, imagery, connotation, sound effects, etc.). They avoid the "what is the hidden meaning of this poem" approach that turns so many people off of poetry, and concentrate instead on how poetry differs from other kinds of writing, and how a poem can communicate so much to a reader in so few words. These books can help readers see more of what's happening in poems, as well as helping beginning poets become aware of all the tools and techniques that are available to them.
Oliver's book is the shortest of the three and might be the best one for a complete beginner to start with.
But we shouldn't forget, in avoiding the frantic search for "the meaning" of a poem, that poems are "about" something (well, most of them are). In her collection of essays Nine Gates (Harper Collins, 1997) Jane Hirshfield gives us an integrated, holistic look at the ingredients of poems. Yes, the musical and rhetorical elements of poems are important, she says, and so is the connection the poem makes between the specific and personal on the one hand, and the external and public on the other. There's no "correct" proportion of private/internal to public/external, but many poems do manage to both balance and connect the two.
The essays in Nine Gates also discuss how a poem can tell a story while omitting details or even whole swaths of narrative that would be considered essential in prose; introduces the reader to some Japanese poets; and gives the only useful and coherent definition I've ever seen of that usually vague poetic term, "voice".
Michael Bugeja's The Art and Craft of Poetry (Writer's Digest Press), Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand (Tilbury House) and Robin Behn and Chase Twichell's The Practice of Poetry (HarperCollins) all contain explanations of the ingredients of poems and exercises for writing based on those explanations.
Unlike the first two books, each written by one individual, The Practice of Poetry comprises contributions by dozens of poets who teach creative writing. The chapters range from an introduction to a specific form, the Persian ghazal, with suggestions on how to write one (by Agha Shahid Ali) to thought-jogging recommendations like taking three unrelated events and writing a poem about them. (by Sydney Lea).
Bugeja's and Kowit's books are very similar in some ways, very different in others. Each one is made up of chapters that explore the building blocks of poetry (imagery, metaphor, forms, titles), poetic genres and subject matter (narratives, political poems, love poems, nature poems), or techniques for beginning or revising poems (automatic writing, "cut-ups"), with exercises attached to each chapter.
Bugeja's approach, however, is much more procedural. Sometimes it as if he's giving a recipe or a computer program for writing poems. Still, this "step one, step two, step three" approach can be useful in showing how one poet, at least, works.
Kowit's book, on the other hand, has a more fun-loving tone, which is not to say that it isn't just as serious and useful as the others. Neither approach is wrong; writing poetry is both hard work and serious play.
So you know that iambic pentameter is five ta-TUM's in a line, and a sonnet is fourteen of those lines, but now you want to learn more than the one-sentence definitions? You want to find out how poets have used different meters and forms over the centuries, and what kinds of effects they can get out of them?
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, by Paul Fussell (Random House, 1979), A Prosody Handbook, by Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum (Harper & Row, 1965), and The Poem's Heartbeat, by Alfred Corn (Story Line, 1997) are all good intermediate books on the subject. They'll show you, for example, that iambic pentameter usually isn't five unvaried ta-TUM's in a row, but rather, that poets avoid boring regularity, and achieve many powerful effects, by (for example) turning one of those ta-TUM's into a TUM-ta, or adding an extra syllable (ta-ta-TUM), or by varying the basic pattern in some other way.
Fussell's book contains more specifically about forms than the other two; Shapiro and Beum's book has more about enjambment (line breaks) than the others; and there are other differences of detail and emphasis. But any of the three will take you to a much higher level of understanding of prosody than those short-answer definitions you learned in English 101, and it's worthwhile to read all three.
Meter in English: A Critical Engagement, edited by David Baker (Arkansas, 1996), is a symposium-in-print in which several poets and scholars answer a set of ten questions about the theory and practice of metrical poetry. Some of the questions are about very technical points of terminology, but others will be of interest to the practicing poet. For example, the participants talk about whether syllabic or accentual meters exist in modern English, and discuss the many complications of triple (dactyic and anapestic) meters that don't arise in duple (iambic and trochaic) meters.
But can't readers and writers of "free verse" simply ignore all that stuff about prosody? Not at all. In his book Free Verse (Princeton, 1980), Charles O. Hartman points out that although free verse, by definition, does not have regular meter underlying its rhythm, it still has "prosodic" devices -- that is, ways in which the poet can control the reader's experience of the poem in time. He further argues that, in the absence of meter, the poet must use the line, and line breaks, to exert that control. The book is a detailed look at how free-verse poets have used the length of lines, the implied pause at the end of the line, and enjambment (the breaking of the line either at a natural pause in speech or in the middle of a phrase).
For a very thorough look at enjambment, see chapter 5 of John Hollander's Vision and Resonance (Oxford, 1975). He shows in great detail the different effects that different kinds of enjambment can produce. Although most of his examples are from Milton, the principles Hollander demonstrates are applicable to both metrical and free verse. (Other chapters of this book treat such subjects as meter, rhyme, and titles in similarly great detail.)
Annie Finch's The Ghost of Meter (Michigan, 1993) examines how certain meters, especially iambic pentameter, have come over the years to carry certain cultural baggage -- that is, how readers have learned to have certain expectations about poems written in that meter. Finch shows how poets from Dickinson to Whitman to Eliot and down to today have both used and avoided the pentameter and other meters to convey irony, sublimity, and many other states, and how free-verse poets play different meters off one another to achieve various effects.
Just as there are books devoted to "the opening" and "the endgame" of chess, there are studies of the titles and the endings of poems.
I've already mentioned the chapter on titles in Hollander's Vision and Resonance. There's also a book-length study, The Title to the Poem, by Anne Ferry (Stanford, 1996). (It's called The Title TO, not OF, the Poem -- a pun on "title" as "proof of ownership", as in "the title to this car" -- because it begins with a look at the history of titles in English poetry, and shows how various people, not just the poet, assumed the right to title and re-title poems.)
The classic study of the other end of the poem is Poetic Closure, by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Chicago, 1968), which shows the various uses of meter, repetition, sound effects, subject matter, and other elements that poets have used over the centuries to bring their poems not just to an end but to "closure" (or to trick the reader into expecting closure before the actual end, or to avoid closure on purpose).
Haiku, whether in Japanese or in Western languages, is one
of the most misunderstood poetic forms. I'm no expert on it
myself, but I do know a lot more about its history, the
culture in which it appeared and developed, and its migration
into English, after reading the following web sites and books,
all of which I recommend:
Bruce Tindall Haiku
bruce.tindall@gmail.com
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