A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry by Gregory Orr, and: How Poems Get Made by James Longenbach (review)

Watching the titles of new poetry manuals get steadily more authoritative is perhaps a slender entertainment, but one not to be missed. Like the self-help genre as a whole, such books assume a readership with neither the time nor memory to locate, much less to consult, countless prior texts on the subject. Amid the glut, each new entry needs a way to distinguish itself—by the author's credentials, the quality of table-talk about craft and inspiration, the extent to which prosody is discussed, and the types of poets and poems it brandishes as exemplary.

Poets and professors Gregory Orr and James Longenbach approach their own guidebooks with correspondingly different motives, skills, and procedures. Orr's agenda is more soulful and improvised than Longenbach's, with avuncular attention to the "young poet or reader" of today. Workshop exercises, references to Jay-Z's memoir, a glossary of terms, and spoon-fed chapter headings such as "Poetry is Both Simple and Complex," "Gathering Poems You Love," and "Some Basic Issues" can be found in Orr's "primer." Longenbach's book, half the size of Orr's, reads instead like an extended essay; each chapter breaks down "the most fundamental elements of the medium" with the efficient, quasi-New-Critical treatment he has brought to his other books and articles. Ultimately, the titles say it all: Orr's book is very much in the do-it-yourself mode, while Longenbach's favors product over process. One celebrates poetry writing as a path to self-discovery, while the other examines poems as the "verbal contraptions" Auden called them. Otherwise, apart from sharing a publisher, the two treatises are united by a focus on lyrical over narrative and dramatic verse, recourse to similar canonical English and American poets (and, more than once, to the same literary quotations), and the absence of technical jargon about meter.

The chief difference between these poet-explicators is their beliefs about how poems originate. In his first chapter, Orr writes: "Lyric poetry is the voice of the individual making sense of his or her experiences." His book proceeds to outline strategies for "the liberation of self through language," as a later chapter sub-heading puts it. Longenbach complicates matters:

Although a poem may well be provoked by a moment of insight or observation, a poem is a record of its maker's passionate relationship with the medium, and while that relationship is fraught, like any such relationship, the record is permanently available.

Referring to linguistic and sonic elements such as diction, syntax, rhythms, and figures, he writes, in the vein of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," that the poetic "medium also consists of the ways in which these elements have been arranged in previous poems." He concludes that "the knowledge we derive from a lyric is inevitably a repetition of what we already know, even if we're encountering a poem for the first time."

Orr doesn't neglect the capacity for poems to memorialize the linguistic clashes all makers have within their medium. He writes, for example, that "because the word order of a sentence is flexible, syntax can be both an ordering and a disordering element in a poem." Helpfully, he then explains how Yeats' pursuit of a "passionate syntax" led to "elaborate suspensions of meaning" in poems such as "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman." Orr follows this up by recounting Hart Crane's assertion to Harriet Monroe that metaphors sometimes create an "apparent illogic" which rivals "the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed."

For Orr, however, the student of poetry has more to learn from understanding how poems range themselves along a continuum—whether they contain or surrender to the disorder or "illogic" that Crane references—than from dissecting the exclusively linguistic properties of a poem. Arguably, any...