How to Write a Poem

In How to Write a Poem, poet John Redmond challenges our sense of what is possible within a poem.

Setting aside the vexed question of what poetry is, he replaces it with the more helpful and exciting question: What might poetry be?

By focusing on the future of poetry in this way, he affirms that a poem may take a new shape or behave differently to previous poems.

The book acknowledges that to have a sense of what a poem might do, we must first see what other poems have already done.

Redmond pays attention to traditional forms, such as the sonnet, the epistle and the ode, and to traditional rhyming techniques, but focuses on the fundamental principles of poetic construction: Who is speaking and to whom?

Where is the speaker located? And why does their speaking take this form? Such questions encourage readers to experiment with poetry, and to create something fresh.