Reading poetry can make a profound impact on your writing, whether you’re an aspiring poet looking for inspiration or you’re a fiction writer who is keen to learn how poetry can improve your writing.
Below, we’re sharing five inspiring poets and a piece of their writing that you can use to inform and inspire your own writing.
Sylvia Plath
Plath is one of the founding figures of modern poetry, and no doubt you will have heard her name and know something about her tragic life story even if you have never read her poetry. We recommend reading her essay found in Bloodaxe Books collection Strong Words as a great introduction to the difference between writing poetry and writing fiction.
Michael Ondaatje
Booker-prize winning Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist. We recommend reading Sweet Like a Crow as it is an excellent example of the way imagery in writing can used not only to conjure visual pictures but to stimulate all of the senses – in this case the sense of sound.
Jacob Polley
Poetry allows the poet to take a small, perhaps often overlooked object and turn it into something beautiful, mesmerising, and profound. An excellent example of this is Polley’s A Jar of Honey.
Simon Armitage
Reading poems by experienced poets can help your own writing in multiple ways, as they demonstrate different aspects of craft and form to inform and inspire your own writing. Armitage’s Not The Furniture Game is a brilliant example of this, as it’s an excellent example of imagery, metaphor, and use of stanza breaks to influence the meaning and impact of the poem.
Deryn Rees Jones
As a writer, the words you use are the building blocks of your poem or story – choosing the right ones is incredibly important and has a profound effect on your reader. Rees Jones’s Song to Noise is an excellent example of how repetition in writing can have a big impact on the reader.
Bonus books
We couldn’t talk about inspiring poets without spotlighting the works of NCW Academy tutors Rebecca Goss, Kathryn Simmonds, and Helen Ivory. Rebecca’s fourth collection, Latch, is rooted in East Anglia and uses nature as a vessel for exploring relationships – both marital and mother-daughter. Kathryn Simmonds’ Scenes from Life on Earth is an exploration of grief told through the prism of faith. Helen Ivory’s Wunderkammer is a collection of new and selected poems which showcase her expertise with surrealism and marries visual art with poetry.
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