Poetry in the Making: An Anthology

This book was recommended to me by my mentor when I was in graduate school. While more complete Hughes writings on poetry are available, this little volume gets all the major points of writing poetry, although you do have to get past that his target was pre-teens. The notes for teachers are also valuable in that it doesn't have to be used as a teaching plan, but more like a strategy for the new writer to work on the skills that he's talking about. I like this book because it's quick, not terribly expensive, and pretty much gets to the point. Good for the new writer.

The first thing to say as far as recommending the book is that most of the best parts are in "Winter Pollen", the excellent collection of Hughes' essays edited by William Scammell, which is all in all a better, bigger book. This book is programs he wrote and read on the BBC in the mid-sixties. They are talks directed to children about writing poetry. They would have been incomprehensible to most school age kids I know but this is a different age and country, and I imagine that his encouragement may have been a real benefit to young listeners. And a good part of his encouragement has to do with reaching into the mystery of existence, something some children long for. It is a counter-Educational point of view with its ideal of an answer for every question, or if not an answer, an attitude. Anyway, he encourages the exploration the mysteries of sensory life, and the mysteries of thought and feeling, and the great generally unnoticed difference that exists between experience and the words we represent it with - (this last is in "Winter Pollen"). So it's not really about the writing of poetry so much as it is about Jesus' admonition that we must become as little children. Of course, Jesus didn't mean to become as little children in the way most of us are (especially poets): in our constant need for attention and affirmation, he meant in openness, in wonder.