How to Write a Poetry Book

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today I'm going to talk with you about how to write a poetry book. Now, before you write a poetry book, you have to already be a poet, and you have to have amassed a lot of different kinds of poems. So, first of all, become a poet, write poems. If you're writing a compilation, this will be a little bit easier to write a poetry book because you're going to be getting poems from friends, and you're going to include in this anthology. But the, for the purposes of this video, I'm going to talk about writing one of your own, and only your own poetry. Most poetry books have a theme that they relate to the reader. For example, if you write a lot of poems about nature, you might want to write a poetry book containing all of those poems rather than just, you know, sort of using all of your poems in one book, so that you'll actually have a theme to it. As in with this example of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and the Illuminations, that these are only select poems by Rimbaud that are along a common theme, as opposed to anything else. So, also what you might want to do is put your poems together, alternating between, you know, long poems, short poems, serious poems, light-hearted poems, just like you would if you were a musician composing an album, so that you give the reader a little bit of variety as they read along, so that not everything seems to be the same exact poem. And finally, you can market your poetry book by reading your poetry aloud, and actually taking your book with you and selling them after your reading. So, those are some ideas for writing a poetry book."