Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide

Mark Yakich chose Carl Sandburg’s admonition, “Beware of advice, even this,” as his epigraph for Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide. But don’t jump to conclusions. This book is full of good advice, interesting asides and lively humor, while at the same time offering options. For example, Yakich writes: “Work on one poem at a sitting.” In the next paragraph it’s, “Work on multiple poems at a sitting.”

Mark Yakich chose Carl Sandburg’s admonition, “Beware of advice, even this,” as his epigraph for Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide. But don’t jump to conclusions. This book is full of good advice, interesting asides and lively humor, while at the same time offering options. For example, Yakich writes: “Work on one poem at a sitting.” In the next paragraph it’s, “Work on multiple poems at a sitting.”

Yakich gives the reader reasons for those contrasting statements and writes that his survivor’s guide is “Not the survivor’s guide—just one of many possibilities.” He clarifies using the word survivor in the title of his book: “Not the I’m-good-in-an-emergency kind, but the let’s-get-through-this-day kind. The truth is that being a survivor often simply comes down to being alive.”

Yakich is a professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and editor of New Orleans Review. He was a 2012 Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lisbon, and has published six poetry collections. He divides his latest book into two sections: Reading and Writing. They cover just about every aspect of each that a beginning or more practiced poet could learn from. He draws heavily on quotes from well-known writers, and refers to scores of poems as examples. Unfortunately, he shows us very few of those poems—even a line or two would have been nice—so I had to look them up elsewhere.

Throughout the Reading and Writing portions, Yakich writes in short paragraphs, making it easy to read the book from beginning to end or pick and choose. Here are some little gifts he’s assembled for us in the Reading chapter:

“Whether or not you are conscious of it, you are always looking for an excuse to stop reading a poem and move on to another poem or to do something else entirely. Resist this urge as much as possible”

“The very best way to read a poem is perhaps to be young, intelligent, and slightly drunk.”

“[ . . . ] it’s okay if you don’t understand a poem. Sometimes it takes dozens of readings to come to the slightest understanding. And sometimes understanding never comes.”

With his short paragraphs and use of humor, Yakich’s writing is inviting as it instructs.

What about plowing through book length poems like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Yakich’s answer: “it’s invaluable to fall asleep periodically. Those moments between waking and sleeping are fertile, portentous spaces for the imagination.” And preceding several positive reasons for attending poetry readings, he must have been smiling when he wrote, “The way to really know how close you are to someone is to test the relationship to near destruction. Take him or her to a poetry reading.”

On a more serious note, Yakich enlightens us on the popularity of published poetry collections, stating that even prizewinning poetry books on Amazon have only two or three reviews:

whereas you will find everything from coffee filters and nose hair trimmers to cat litter boxes and underpants being reviewed in the thousands. Make no mistake, a book of poems serves comparatively little utility in day-to-day living.

For those writers among the readers, this widely published poet offers snippets of ideas in the book’s Writing section. If you want to write in a particular form, he suggests haiku, tanka, acrostic or telestich due to their ease of learning and the fact that they can lead to more complex forms (though other readers, like me, may need to refresh their memories on the last two forms he mentions).

Yakich cheers and challenges writers with recommendations such as, “Try writing a series of personal poems without using ‘I.’ It may or may not help to remember that even Narcissus couldn’t see his reflection in running water.” Also, “If you wake up one day at age 65 or 75 and feel badly because you have not written a novel or a memoir, don’t worry. There will still be time to write a few poems.”

As you can see, Yakich’s playful humor is sprinkled throughout the book. I especially love this bit: “Why don’t more poets kill themselves? Because it’s not worth it if you can’t write about it afterward.”

Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide is an encouraging and entertaining handbook, and an absolutely fun way to learn. And one more thing, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you skip Yakich’s epilogue, which invites us into his shower for one of the funniest chapters I’ve read in any book.