Find poems to love in anthologies

Every now and then, poets who are ready to step up their level of poetry-writing ask me to recommend poems they might study and emulate. No, not to mimic someone else’s voice or style, but to discover their own preferences and improve their use of technique.

Art students do this all the time. i.e. They typically study and copy the masters in order to find out what works and why. Then, having discovered a wide assortment of useful tools and techniques, they go on to find their own creative methods of working.

Conversely, I’ve found that many poets give little thought to poetry forms, styles, techniques, tips for revision, or precision in their choices of words. Worse, many poets don’t read poems by other poets, which handicaps them without their knowing it as they have few options except for what comes to mind.

Since we have centuries and centuries of beautifully expressed poetry to draw from, you can find all sorts of anthologies that collect poems around a central theme, subject, or form. Also, The Norton Anthology of Poetry aims to put together as many poems in English as possible.

To give you other anthologies I recommend with poems worth studying and enjoying, here’s a list of ones I’ve reviewed in the order shown:

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry 

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 

Saint Peter’s B List 

Villanelles anthology 

Joy: 100 Poems 

The Soul in Paraphrase 

As publishers send me new copies of poetry books and anthologies to review, I’ll let you know of engaging poems and anthologies I’ve found that connect well with readers - including you and me!

Remember: We're first readers of poetry. Then, Lord willing, we become poets prepared to write poems that other people will want to read.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019, poet-writer

…

What draws you to write poems?

As a kid, I used to draw faces. The similarities and dissimilarities between us make a fascinating mix we could observe forever and still find something unique. Now, as a poet-writer in all genres, I seldom draw anything, but I continue to be drawn to people and the human and spiritual natures that connect us and yet differ too.

Take, for example, the general, skeletal outline we share. Some bones seem shortened, some elongated, some sturdy, some rather frail. Regardless, we each have a skeleton wrapped in us.

Or take our eyes. Some seem as open to fresh air as windows on an afternoon in Spring, while others seem unfathomable or (shudder) unlit. Nevertheless, we're each meant to have eyes.

And what about our poetic interests? Children like to experiment, play, and discover, but people who lose those qualities of wonder may be less apt to investigate new territories or develop creativity.

To be honest, I didn’t think about any of those things before writing “Adult Coloring Book.” Instead, the poem rose to the surface for me to write down and, only later, invite me to explore my ongoing interest in “you,” “them,” and (my favorite) “us.”


Adult Coloring Book

The people in these poems are void
of pigment – transparent but for bones
of chalk, Swiss cheese, or granite.

Sometimes they look at us with eyes
cat-colored by the sun but never sky
or tree bark or lumps of unlit coal.

Their hands weave lace from sea foam
and sew dandelions around our souls.

They stitch together words in folds
of scripture, ready to read us, ready
to color us whole.

By Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, from poetry book Lost in Faith

Lost in Faith



…