Book Review: Inside Out Is a Poetry Collection That Shows—Not Tells—You How to Write Poetry
Imagine taking a dance class in which your spend the first three weeks at a desk hearing lectures. Here’s how to do the jitterbug. Here’s how to do the waltz. Hold your partner like this. Put your left foot there, and do this with your right foot, just like the diagram says. You take notes, yawn, and glance at the attractive classmate sitting across from you, who is glancing back. You haven’t moved a muscle all morning…
No, no, no, you say. From the very start, the dance class belongs on the dance floor, where the teacher demonstrates the jitterbug, the waltz, the samba, with a partner to the beat of the music. Hey, this looks like fun. I think I can do that. I am going to do that.
The preceding thought experiment illustrates the pedagogy of Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises by poet Marjorie Maddox. A professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University, Maddox gives readers 27 poems embodying and illuminating different aspects of the craft that prove showing is better than telling. They’re written with the light-heartedness and verve of a catchy tune that pulls you out on the dance floor. Inside Out is a book that would rev up a high school English class, or the daily writing session of a lone poet. The exercises at the book’s end, which provide additional guidance and needed structure for the learning process, are just as high-spirited and inviting.
As you might expect, the line-up of poems includes those about poetic forms—two witty sonnets on how to write sonnets, an especially masterful sestina on sestinas, and a couplet etude (“Poetic twins all dressed in rhyme/stroll side-by-side in two straight lines”), for example. However, Maddox wisely leads off with poems that go to the heart of poetry, no matter how it’s packaged. The first poem, “How to See a Poem,” celebrates imagination. “Close your eyes,” we’re instructed right off the bat. “Just keep not/looking into what’s expected/until you’re free to see/with vision that’s beyond/the ordinary.”
The poems that follow tell us how to hear, taste, smell, and touch a poem (“There’s a peppermint odor to odes,” for example). In other words, write poetry grounded in our senses. “Tug of War between Concrete and Abstract” rightfully warns us not to stray from our nerve endings (“Abstract wears gloves and pulls limply”).
Other poems on craft basics such as similes and metaphors, personification, enjambment, and onomatopoeia give an aspiring poet plenty of moves whether he or she is dancing a sonnet or free verse. Who knew that a poem about the caesura (“is sleepy-eyed, sometimes/dozing—ah, yes—even midsentence”) could make you laugh?
And that’s the point of Maddox’s modus operandi. Make poetry fun. Yes, poetry is fun if only because its language gives us pleasure, even when the subject matter is sad or dark. If pleasure isn’t the right word, maybe uplift is. If you can sing your blues, or dance them, maybe you’ll feel better. In that respect, Inside Out is a valuable self-help book for writers and writing teachers.
