Will You Blurb My Book?

Book blurbs are those short recommendations found on book jackets or back covers of paperbacks. They are usually written by another author of that genre and, hopefully, the blurber is even better known than the author of the book you are holding. It is a kind of endorsement. 

I have written two blurbs and it is not an easy task. Of course, it must be positive. For a poetry book, it must sound a bit poetic. Having written many recommendations for students applying to college and ones for older friends applying for jobs, the assignment is similar but more concise. They are similar to those quotes from critics on film ads and posters. An excerpt from a longer review that has been carefully selected as a promotion.

The NPR Books newsletter recently informed me that the book industry really doesn’t like blurbs

You know them. But the book blurb industrial complex got shook up recently when Simon & Schuster’s publisher announced they’d no longer be requiring blurbs for the books under their flagship imprint. In an essay for Publisher’s Weekly, publisher Sean Manning wrote, “I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.”

This might seem insidery industry business to you (and maybe that’s one reason S&S is getting rid of blurbs!), but let me tell you, there’s been a lot of chatter in the book world about it. LitHub called it a “dazzling move.” Slate spoke to an anonymous novelist who called blurbs “a lazy tactic made popular by publishers who can’t be arsed to fairly distribute and creatively employ a marketing budget.” The author Rebeccca Makkai talked about the energy-suck that is blurb writing in an essay for The New York Times. The lone pro-blurb piece I could find was this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, which compared the practice to an employer asking for references.

Does a blurb have any influence on whether or not you will read or buy a book or change your opinion about an author? If a Poet Laureate blurbs a book, does that mean it's a good book? Chances are very good that the blurber knows the blurbee, so it is a favor. Like those college and job recommendations, you don't ask some to write one if you think they will write a bad one. I have passed on writing recommendations and even once on a book blurb because I didn't feel I could honestly make an endorsement.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Close Readings of Poems in the Singing School

I was rereading parts of Robert Pinsky's Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. The "singing school" of his title comes from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" 

Can you learn to be a poet by studying poems? It might help, but no. But you can certainly learn about poetry and how to read poems.

The collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Pinsky emphasizes ways to learn from great work. There are 80 poems and Pinsky's introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works.

This is the close study of poems, which I have done in workshops. He notes William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for its intense verbal music. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for its wild imagination in matter-of-fact language. He directs us to Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for "surrealist aplomb." Observe the subtle meter in Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.” 

Robert Pinsky is a fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum. His books include At the Foundling Hospital, a best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante, and in prose The Life of David, on the Biblical figure, and his Selected Poems. His autobiography is Jersey Breaks.

Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate met such enthusiastic national response that he was appointed to an unprecedented third term. As Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of American readers, of varying backgrounds, ages, and regions, read their favorite poems. The videos at favoritepoem.org show that poetry has a vigorous presence in American culture. 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Island

"No man is an island" was originally "No man is an Iland" and is a famous line from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work. It was the 17th devotion, Meditation XVII. When you see this a s a poem, it is that Donne's punctuation becomes line breaks. The poem also includes the line "...for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

That prose work as a whole is considered similar to 17th-century devotional writing generally, and particularly to Donne's Holy Sonnets. It might surprise you that Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphor. In "The Flea," a flea biting two lovers is compared to sex.

Donne is considered to be a "Metaphysical poet" which was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. Modern critics often say that "baroque poets" may be more accurate as Donne and other don't fit our more common philosophical use of metaphysical as meaning the study of reality and existence.

If you read any of Donne in school, it was probably "No Man Is An Island" or "Death Be Not Proud," but not  "To His Mistress Going to Bed" or "The Flea." 

"No Man Is an Island" is a poem that explores the interconnectedness of humanity and the impact of loss. The speaker asserts that no individual is isolated, but rather an integral part of the broader human collective. The poem uses the metaphor of comparing humankind to a continent, with each person being a "piece" or "part" of the whole.

Loss appears as the erosion of land by the sea. Donne suggests that the death of even one person diminishes the entire human race. This idea is emphasized by the shift from the hypothetical ("If a clod be washed away") to the personal ("As well as if a manor of thy friend's/Or of thine own were").

The poem's concluding lines, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee," encapsulate the theme of shared mortality and emphasize the inevitability of death for all.

For this month's call for submissions, we invite poems that consider the island metaphor, our shared world, or the inevitability of death. Donne loved metaphors and that should be a starting place for you. Perhaps, an island suggests other metaphors to you. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the island is a metaphor with multiple layers as it represents isolation, both physically and psychologically, away from the regular world where the characters are stranded. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE March 31, 2025

Some Donne allusions trivia:

•  No Man Is an Island is also a 1955 book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
• "For whom the bell tolls" was used by Ernest Hemingway as the title of his 1940 novel. Hemingway uses it as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War, implying that people in America or other countries should care about what was happening there, and not ignore it because it was happening far away.    
• The band Jefferson Airplane inserts between the track "A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You Shortly" and the song "Young Girl Sunday Blues," this Donne joke "No man is an island! He's a peninsula."

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John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, and soldier who later became a cleric in the Church of England as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money that he inherited during and after his education on womanizing, literature, pastimes and travel.

In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He served as a member of Parliament.

Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Poets Online Discussion and Sharing

PoetsOnline.org is the main site for our monthly online poetry magazine where we offer you the opportunity to write a poem to a monthly writing prompt for possible publication. 

We also have a Facebook group that is open and a place to share your poems, books, things you are reading, events and all things poetic - especially when they are online. We welcome your participation.

We also have an "official" Facebook page where monthly updates on new prompts and submission deadlines appear. and additional links to poetry news. We hope to will follow us at both places.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org