Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Poetry and Privacy questions a set of relationships critical, authorial, and existential between poetry and the public sphere. Its main contention that readings of British and Irish poetry rely too often on a thesis of public relevance arises out of a more general conviction: that the relationship between poetry and the public sphere is negatively woven. It is undoubtedly true that poetry and criticism are bitterly aware of their marginal status. Both have lost confidence and direction. In public life as in literary life, we have entered a period of deleveraging and disavowal, of recanting and retrenchment. This seems a good time for emptying out some old ways of thinking about poetry. Large claims were made for poetry in the 1930s and large claims were made for literary criticism in the 1970s, but they have led to no obvious outcomes in the public world.
The major response of poetry to its marginal position has been promotional in outlook and anti-intellectual in spirit, and in the context of burgeoning creative writing courses universities host a poetic class both anti-academic and hostile to intelligent scrutiny. Each needs the other but the result is trimmed expectations, the dominance of populism and a poverty of ideas.
In essays on Derek Mahon, Glyn Maxwell, Robert Minhinnick, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, John Burnside, Vona Groarke, David Jones and W.S. Graham, John Redmond seeks to introduce a sense of pragmatism into the relationships between poetry and criticism (academe) and poetry and social or political relevance. It opposes is the determination to read poetry in publicly oriented ways, the determination to make it fit with one kind of public program or another. The essays in this book offer fresh appraisals of noteworthy poets while creating a portrait of British and Irish poetry in a new century in which in politics, society and poetry there is a broad sense of an ending, and ask how poetry might progress in the future.
On Poetry and Privacy:
Selected by The Guardian as one of the best poetry books of 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/07/best-poetry-2013#:~:text=Poetry%20and%20Privacy%3A%20Questioning%20Public,best%20to%20say%20no%20more.
“impressively written and thought-provoking collection of essays” - David Spittle in P. N. Review: https://www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/ion-john-redmondaeurtms-ipoetry-and-privacy/9216
“an important intervention” - David Kennedy in Stride: https://www.stridebooks.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202013/april%202013/redmond%20rev.kennedy.htm
“This is close reading as spectator sport, carried out with real gusto and sense of discovery” David Wheatley in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/21/poetry-privacy-john-redmond-review
How to Write a Poem
Through a series of chapters designed as useful provocations, Redmond steers readers away from the 'default contemporary poem', urging fresh ways of thinking, insisting on 'the promise and opportunity of the blank page'. Traditional chapter topics like the sestina and the sonnet are abandoned in favour of more inspiring themes like variety, scale and background.
The book draws on a wide array of examples, from sixth-century Ireland to contemporary Poland, and diverse cultural analogies from baseball to film. Rather than thinking of poems as having meanings, the book suggests that we should think of them of being like plays, or computer games, as experiences designed for the reader’s benefit.
On How to Write a Poem:
“in my opinion one of the best books about poetry ever written … admirably plain-spoken” Ian Sansom in Times Literary Supplement November 4 2022
"John Redmond's "How to Write a Poem" contains no false notes. He does not patronise his reader with easy examples or workshop games, but lights on his subject with elegant pragmatism and humility. His overall argument arises from a very personal yet wholly professional sense of poetry as an art form in practice, and his examples are informed by deep reading and writerly intuition. I consider the book a small masterpiece of clarity, economy and experience. It brings light to poetry as something made: something real and realised." David Morley, Warwick University
"The examples throughout the book are contemporary and provocative in the most helpful sense. ... [Redmond] clearly loves poems, enough to show you in detail how they work." Poetry News