Cultivating the Coterie: The Art and Craft of Poetry

by Dana Luther

Dana Luther, a professional editor and former writing instructor, freelances in Evanston, Illinois.

Stereotype depicts poets as overly reflective, retiring folks who commune with nature and do somersaults at the thought of love. Michael J. Bugeja's textbook, which steps aspiring poets through the working side of poetry, soundly defies this silly image while it does justice to many meaningful traditional themes. It isn't the newest poetry workbook, but it is certainly one of the best.

Commendably, this book requires commitment from those who use it. Unlike many how-to's, this is not just a catalog of suggestions, but a text with a genuine mission that delivers gratifying results. That mission is mentorship, from primer to practicum. The only missing element is the mentor's feedback. The book's overall effect is edification. It oversees both the improvement of a poet's skill and the construction of an ultimate work, a chapbook.

The appropriate audience ranges from sophisticated high-schoolers on up, but only an adult sensibility will be equal to the task. The book is wonderfully adaptable, but not a quick and easy romp through the daffodils. It draws readers in, forcing them to think and work hard enough to lose themselves.

Bugeja's "art" and "craft" are the sample poems and the process of incubating ideas, respectively. Like Renaissance poet George Herbert, whose verse appears in the book to exemplify voice and genre, Bugeja proves that personal history plus vocational dedication equals good poetry. Originally trained as a musician, Bugeja is a prolific poet with five book-length collections to his credit. He is a professor of writing and ethics at the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, poetry editor for Writer's Digest and co-editor of Poet's Market.

Not a Typical Approach
Bugeja's is not a typical approach . He admits that his method may seem starkly "reportorial" to some, and for good reason -- he puts to use his journalistic background. He contrasts this process with the cliché of waiting for an inspirational strike from the Muse. His method is inarguably the more productive.

From the first page, Bugeja encourages poets to list their major life events, which he calls "epiphanies" and "peak experiences." He intends this list as a potentially endless fountain of ideas. Bugeja shows how he has referred to his own list over and over through his poetic career; as time passes, he uses the same items as springboard material for many different pieces.

The next important dimension of the poet's practice is journal-keeping. While Bugeja relies heavily on excerpts from his own notes, he also shares with readers the scrupulous note-taking habits of prominent contemporary poets such as Dana Gioia. To illustrate how this process works for him and can work for readers, Bugeja shows readers the evolution of his own poems from start to finish. We see actual initial lists, outlines for ideas, notes on fleshing out ideas, early drafts, and final poems.

The book is divided into three main sections based on a hierarchical understanding of poetic elements. After leading readers from idea generation to development, Bugeja presents chapters on traditional genres (love poetry, war poetry, and nature poetry, for example). Next he explicates the "tools" of voice, line stanza, title, meter and rhyme, following these with poetic forms (narrative, lyric, dramatic; sonnet, sestina, and pantoum, to mention a few). He illustrates each genre, stanza type and form with contemporary and classic poems. Near the end of each chapter, "mini anthologies" serve as textual review to ground poets in the kind of work that they are about to attempt.

Chapters end with three levels of exercises based on the reader's collected journal entries. Readers can pace themselves through the book one level at a time. Exercise questions are demanding and thought-provoking. They are not designed for those who are content to live the unexamined life.

Beginning or Experienced Poets
Beginning poets can use this book as a primer; just reading these well-chosen poems is a valuable introduction. More experienced poets can work through the method again and again to bring their work to successively sophisticated levels. Ultimately, students at any level can learn how to generate ideas, organize and track them, shape them, revise them, and select the best results for a potential chapbook.

The Art and Craft of Poetry is reverent without being stuffy. It's invitational in both tone and motive. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, coterie poets wrote poetry as exercise in logical thought and rhetoric. They circulated their poems in manuscript form and didn't necessarily intend them for publication. Consciously or not, Bugeja manages to update such a notion and take it a step further. He welcomes readers into the coterie of practitioners, making prospective poets feel that the coterie is open rather than exclusive, and encouraging them to "create art that will endure."

I especially liked the "Approach and Perspective" section in Chapter Four. Bugeja is referring to the importance of freshness, emotional and environmental credibility in "extranatural" poetry here. But it's excellent advice to keep in mind for any piece, whatever the genre. He warns against falling into the trap of ordinariness, and shows examples of what does and doesn't work.

I was surprised to find the chapter on war poetry very compelling. Its merit is largely due to Bugeja's inclusion of fine poems by Bruce Weigl. Throughout the book, the content and emotional power of sample poems and exercises may hit hard. As a whole, the book is not emotionally uplifting, though it will certainly "bring up" feelings by goading them out. This contributes to the genuineness of the book and to the power of the aspiring poet's results as well. Readers should expect to do a fair bit of self-examination, spend some time reflecting carefully upon their pasts, and to find good ideas in their responses to the questions.

While I found little to criticize in The Art and Craft of Poetry, Bugeja's inclusion of a lot of his own work mildly irritated me. But, given the book's purpose and method, it is justified. In Chapter One, "Ideas," he immortalizes his own name in a poem, burning it indelibly into readers' minds. He even acknowledges this in a jotted note, calling the poem "a type of 'song to myself'." I couldn't help but find this self-promotional. Bugeja's poems are good instructional tools, however. They allow Bugeja to avoid offending other poets by presuming it's appropriate to map his method onto their work.