I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you all like to read and write poetry. I do too. I’m also an editor of poetry as well as prose, as some of you might already know, and just today we announced a close-reading session over on Strange Pilgrims which has filled up within minutes of opening:

Strange Pilgrims

Introducing Strange Pilgrims Club

Hello fellow strange pilgrims…

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7 months ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Strange Pilgrims and Shannan Mann

In there, I talk a little bit more about the reasoning behind wanting to do a reading club as opposed to a workshop on writing or submitting or anything else. Of course, I do those also, and ONLY POEMS, our poetry magazine, regularly runs some kickass workshops. You can check them out here!

But as a lifelong reader, I’ve always felt the lack of spaces dedicated purely to reading and understanding a creative text, without any desire to bring our own writerly egos in to it (well, as much as that is possible). So, while the Strange Pilgrims Club will be for prose, I’d like to try out a Beautiful Losers Club dedicated to close-reading poetry.

Just as I mention in the linked post above, this is indeed an experiment, and I’d like to keep the space intentional and intimate. For this reason, enrollment will be first-come-first-serve and there will be a waitlist. I will share the recording later on, but if you’re interested in joining in live, please sign up here:

Sign up for Beautiful Losers Club!

During the session we will:

• Do quick introductions

• I’ll share a brief presentation to assist our close read

• We’ll read each poem in full and unpack different elements of what makes it work, what stands out, even what you might not necessarily enjoy or understand

• Participate in open yet structured conversation

I want this to feel like the best kind of workshop classroom. The part I’m most looking forward to is where it opens up into everyone talking about poetry, and about what literature is doing right now.

The session will run for about 60 minutes. If the conversation is thriving I won’t end it prematurely, and anyone who needs to drop off at the 60-minute mark is free to do so (ought to go without saying that I won’t hold you captive before this either, but I want to nurture a sustained space for conversation and analysis, so I’d encourage you to stay for the full 60 minutes at least).

Alright, that’s all from me. Not sure how many folks we’ll get for this man, but I’ll most likely cap this at around 15 people, so it really is first-come-first-served. Please note, that I will keep a few spots reserved for ONLY POEMS Members!

May your life be full of poems,

Shannan

Every poet who’s thought about writing a novel has heard the same advice: slow down, add more, learn to plot. Some of the best novels, though, often work the way poems do—through rhythm, image, compression, obsession.

So below I’ve got just that for you. Beware, though, this isn’t a list of “lyrical” novels—that word has been used to death and means nothing anymore. You won’t find craft books here either. I truly feel that the work of learning to write a novel doesn’t primarily occur by reading about how to write a novel. We learn, most foundationally, by reading other books and talking about them.

So, dig into any of these and tell us if we missed some that should be here! And if you’ve read any of the books on this list, tell us what you thought?

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1. Beloved — Toni Morrison

2. The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

3. Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys

4. Human Acts — Han Kang

5. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

6. Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo

7. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino

8. Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston

9. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez

10. Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler

11. Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

12. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

13. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro

14. The Stranger — Albert Camus

15. Hopscotch — Julio Cortázar

16. Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov

17. As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner

18. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke

19. Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

20. Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee

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My friends, it’s the end of the year, winter has its soft paws in our souls, and we’re all—in some small or large capacity—about to have a change of pace for the next little while before we greet 2026 (in terror or a flurry of excitement…that I leave up to you!).

All in all, it’s a good time to write and an even better time to write more. If you’re a poet or dabble in poetry, perhaps you might naturally gravitate towards slower poems right now, akin to contemplations or prayers. Slow doesn’t always mean sad, of course, and sad isn’t necessarily even tragic. In anycase, poetry in and of itself has some kinda magic that wrenches out the saddest songs from our hearts and forces us to somehow try and commit them to paper (or, you know, the screen).

Now, you might be writing more journalistically (as in, poetry is a way to beautify the diary entry for you), and I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, if that is primarily the case, this post/email probably isn’t for you. You may even be offended by it. For that, I sincerely apologize in advance.

If, however, you—like me—enjoy critique, revision, and have a desire to publish your poetry, then below, I’ve share some observations to help you avoid certain pitfalls that can come with, what I’ll simply call (and hope for you to understand in all its glory and variegatedness) the Sad Poem.

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First, though, some examples of some of the best sad poems I know.:

• Ghazal for Dida by

• Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert

• Leave a Message by Bob Hicok

• Elm by Sylvia Plath

• [All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] by Alejandra Pizarnik

• Gently, Gently by Bert Meyers

• As Ever by Agha Shahid Ali

And now, in connection with the poems I shared above, some observations, organized best I can, to help you stop writing bad sad poems, and…start writing good ones.

On repetition and form as containers for grief

Karan’s ghazal ends every couplet with “god,” creating this incantatory rhythm where the word becomes more complicated each time it appears—blessing, question, threat, absence, and so on. Agha Shahid Ali (my most favorite poet) does something similar in “As Ever,” where the ghazal form holds the desperation:

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So I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain.
Return, if it is just to leave me again.
...
An era’s passed since the luxury of tears–
Make me weep, Consoler, let blood know its rain.

Pizarnik repeats “All night” until it becomes a kind of madness:

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me. All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.

That repetition mirrors the very human experience of insomnia and obsession.

Bob Hicok uses anaphora too: “When the wind died...When the maple tree died...When the roses died...When the child died.” Each “when” is a small funeral, and the structure lets him build to that devastating final line about calling the dead even though “The dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of.”

On getting weird with your sadness

Plath’s “Elm” never once says “I’m sad” or “I’m depressed.” Instead the speaker is a tree, or maybe possessed by a tree, and the imagery gets visceral and strange: My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires” / “I am inhabited by a cry.” That’s so much more unsettling than any direct statement of pain could be.

Pizarnik gives us “feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.” Anatomically impossible yet emotionally nothing could be more honest in that space. Likewise, Bert Meyers writes:

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And you, mad as a clarinet
where the street divides;
a city of raindrops in a bush;
the slow honey that drips
from the sky’s old ladle…

See how the surreal blends and folds and opens up. As when Hicok writes “the father dug a hole in his thigh / and got in,” — the surreal folds right back into the self, the physical, the tangible, and for a moment they are one.

On the physical manifestations of grief

Bad sad poems work mainly with the psychological (without much depth and mostly through cliché) . Good ones can be felt in the body. They yank you into their world. Note in Karan’s Ghazal for Dida: “You blew on the first morsel, then offered each idol” / “she weighs the beads of her rosary to seduce god.” Those are hands doing specific things, rituals you can picture…enact…be possessed by as you read.

Agha Shahid Ali: “Shouting your name till the last car had disappeared, / how I ran on the platform after your train.” Here’s an action anyone who’s been left can see themselves doing. Or “To find her, ‘round phantom-wrists I glue bangles”… the physical is invaded by the psychological, and in that act there is horror…because grief inevitably leads to some form of horror, terror, dread.

And see Meyers, here:

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At night, I was the one
who became a cello,
strung with all our roads,
where memory hums
to itself like a tire.

He’s not saying “I wept from sadness because of stuff I remembered,” but rather gives us the metaphor of becoming an instrument, the image of memory as a humming distended tire.

And of course, Jack Gilbert’s poem in its entirety is sadness made physical. “Michiko Dead” is about carrying a box that’s too heavy, adjusting one’s grip as different muscles tire. He never says “grief” or “I miss her.” Instead, he describes arms underneath, thumbs shifting, blood draining from a raised arm, going numb, finding a way to keep carrying without ever putting it down. Fucking brilliant piece of writing, man.

On sound and music and pain

Bad sad songs often make me cry if I’m in a crying mood. Bad sad poems make me mad, often. Music has the boon of, well, music…whereas poetry’s just got words.

Notice Pizarnik’s syntax, how it gets tangled and frantic:

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All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.

Please, read it aloud, and feel it for yourself, the painful music in the language, the sobbing, ringing loud and clear.

Or dear Sylvia here:

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All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   
Echoing, echoing.

Those hard consonants, that repetition of “echoing.” The sound…harsh and relentless.

Meyers uses music explicitly—cello, clarinet, tuning fork—but he also makes the poem itself musical:

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Gently, gently,
through anger and pain,
love justified itself,
like the nails in the house
during a storm.

Feel that softness in the repetition against the hardness of what he’s describing?

On refusal to comfort

None of these poems offer resolution. Plath ends with the tree/speaker still “inhabited by a cry” that “flaps out / Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.” That’s terrifying, not comforting.

Pizarnik: “All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.”

Karan Kapoor: “Your name is her offering, Karan. The day she dies / you will lose your name, and you will lose god.” The poem doesn’t say “but then I found meaning” or “but love remains.” It ends with that double loss.

These poets trust readers to sit with discomfort, weep, be transformed, mourn, linger on the page…live with the grief and let it leave you silently, perhaps when you’re least expecting it to.

On beginnings

I’ll end with this one. Just look at this utterly heartwrenching yet beautifully simple opening from Bert Meyer's “Gently, Gently”:

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We, too, began with joy.
Then, sickness came;
then, poverty.
We were poor, so poor,
our children were our only friends.

I wish more poems started like this. Not just the sad ones, all of them, happy ones, weird ones, funny ones. So damn simple, yet so transcendental. My whole being feels these opening lines…I want to hug the poet, I want to love the world, I want to hold my daughter forever.

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Last week I shared this:

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And frankly, I’m surprised that over half of you didn’t just fuck right off. I’m so grateful for the wonderful response and that you’re still here. In fact, 743 more of you now than when I sent that post. Which is insane to me.

I’ll kick off the first section of The Only Poetry Curriculum: FOUNDATIONS by sharing an annotated guide to the best poetry craft books for anyone at any stage of their poetic practice.

I do want to share, for those of you who’re new to Beautiful Losers, that this Substack is a mix of my essays, poems, lists and now this curriculum. You can learn more about me here, or take a stroll through my notes.

TWO SHORT NOTES

✦ On Acquiring These Books:

While I’ll always encourage that we support writers and presses as we indulge in tangible literary pleasures by purchasing physical copies of the books we wish to read—I do understand that for some people this can be impossible. You might suggest, then, a visit to the local library and, yet again, I’m all for that….

However, let’s not forget that even this is a luxury and not readily available for everyone in all parts of the world. In the interest of my desire to make this course as accessible as possible, then, I’ll offer the following: if anybody would like any of the books here but cannot either a) afford to purchase their own copy or b) borrow from their library, please just email me here: shannan@onlypoems.net and let me know which book(s) you want—I’ll send you the relevant e-books.

✦ On Studying These Books:

Again, I’m still figuring out how to structure this curriculum, but here’s something that suggested I do, so I’m going to try it. Alongside other posts, every month I’ll choose one of these books and send out a lesson tailored around it. I’ll discuss my own insights from it, key quotations, as well as poetry exercises based on the book’s pedagogy to help your writing and reading.

Alright, on with it!

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The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens | Poetry’s relationship to reality and imagination. Stevens argues the poet must “move constantly in the direction of the credible” and “create his unreal out of what is real.”

The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry | Composition as intellectual labor requiring formal discipline. Valéry insists great poems emerge from practiced exercises. And yet I love Valéry’s famous quote: “Poems are never finished—just abandoned.”

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder | A very accessible refutation of the idea that poetry is difficult and inaccessible. “Poets are alchemists of nothingness,” Zapruder argues, “they aspire to turn silence, nothingness, absence, into something palpable.”

The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach | Close readings of canonical poets showing how notions of excellence are fluid, never fixed. Longenbach critiques how “accomplishment in our poetry has been signaled most often by manner—as if it were the job of artists not to engage the most potent aspects of Dickinson or Eliot but to sequester themselves in one or another schoolroom.”

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke | A touchstone! Spiritual and artistic development is inseparable. Reread this one throughout your life while you “love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.”

Proofs & Theories by Louise Glück | Rigorous yet intimate. On ambition, fear, and the examined poetic life. Essential counterpoint to more prescriptive approaches. Glück suggests “the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing” and that “to perceive [art] at all is to be haunted by it.”

The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness & Imagination by Carl Phillips | Seven essays for poets afraid of their own boldness. Phillips posts on how the “poet possesses … an ability to be in the presence of troubling questions without giving in to the need to resolve them.”

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver | Perhaps you think it might be a cliché to include this one, but truly a foundational education in poetry is incomplete without Mary Oliver. Here, she proclaims that “the poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely.”

The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky | A short guide on how sound creates meaning. Comparing poetry to dance, Pinsky posits that “the medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth.”

A Poet’s Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie | Comprehensive, encyclopedic volume chock full of lessons, descriptions, and definitions for all the technical elements that may make up a poem.ma

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand & Eavan Boland | Anthology with craft notes; shows theory through example. Excellent for seeing how formal choices work in actual poems. “Form, in history and society, is not just a series of masterpieces. It’s also the reflex, the song, the choice, the backhand practice, the joyous enterprise of all poets at all times.”

The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo | Generative writing advice that feels like you’re listening to your favorite old professor. Give yourself permission to write badly and follow obsessions! “In the world of imagination,” Hugo declares, “all things belong.”

Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody by Donald Justice | Aphoristic, gathered thoughts on prosody and composition. More reference than cover-to-cover read, I’d say, but something would be amiss here without this one.

The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov | Poetry’s political and social engagement and the poet as witness. Essential for understanding poetry’s civic function. In the titular essay, Levertov explains that “when words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.”

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle | Playful, digressive, profound treatise on the mystery and (un)mastery of poetry. She shares: “I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, ‘I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say;’ but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays & Interviews by Harryette Mullen | On language, race, identity and experimental poetics as political practice. Mullen also has a keen eye on the future of poetry in connection with the powers that continue to recklessly shape our world.

And now, tell me:

Are there any books here that you’ve already read? If so, what are your favorite insights? Or things you disagree with? Perhaps you have other craft books you feel should have been included here. I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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I’ve seen a lot of personal curricula out there but none (that I’ve come across) have covered poetry. I think I know why. It’s because most people (god bless their souls) don’t give a flying fuck about poetry. And you know what? Just as well. Why do we think that numbers ought to have something profound to say about words? Or that more people equals more value?

Honestly, if you were walkin’ on down the street and spotted a massive throng of people resembling a blob of arms and legs and crazed heads sticking out trying to get inside a building…would you want to join them and get inside there too? Hey—maybe you would, I don’t know and I’m not quite judging. I know though that my introverted ass would be outta there.

Which is all to say, sometimes it’s more pleasant to hang out with the loner beneath the maple tree. And in a world of dragon-fucking riding fantasies and enemies-to-lovers romances and superhero reboots and superhero fatigue and fatigue in general and arthouse cinema with cult followings and Oscar-bait and pop divas crooning about the ChatGPT version of Ophelia…poetry, real poetry, is the loner beneath the maple tree, waiting for you…and it’s not to kill you, but maybe, just maybe, to sit and talk for a while, or soak in the silence and the music of it all.

On that note, then, I want to develop a fully free, accessible, in-depth, fluff-and-frills-less, poetry curriculum for anyone anywhere at any stage of poetry appreciation or practice.

Maybe it’s a stupid task and maybe I should just focus on writing a viral Substack post or creating longform video content, but sooner or later we all need to face up to the biggest truth in life: you are who you are, at any given moment. (Okay, it sounded more profound in my head).

I don’t promise this is what I’ll exactly stick to, but for now, below is what I’m thinking to do on a bi-weekly or monthly basis for the next little while.

Here, I’ll cover some of the core elements of what makes a strong poetry practice and will, hopefully, help you enhance or elevate your poetry reading (and writing) experiences.

You can expect things like:

• Craft books that don’t suck and are actually helpful for fuck’s sake

• A glossary of poetic terms, both obvious and wait-what-that-too? explained in a lucid way with actual examples

• Some favorite quotes and micro-lessons from other influential and way-better-than-me poets and professors

• Core habits that make life a little easier and more poetic, potentially

• And an introduction to the different modalities of poetry (think spoken word yes but also lyrical dialogue, surreal prose, temporal ethereal music, etc. which recreates the poetic experience through language paired with another art-form or two…this is so we can learn to recognize the poetic in the mundane as well as realize the prevalence of poetry in our lives, even when we doom-scroll).

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If you’re into anything rooted in literature (which, you probably are, if you’re on Substack in the first place), then I bet you’ve read a little bit about what the hell literary or artistic style is. I do feel strongly though that style, when it comes to poetry, is an entirely differnt beast than with novels, short stories, film, etc. So, I’ll try to expand on that while also touching on:

• Traditional forms and why it can be fun to “bring them back” so to speak

• Contemporary and hybrid forms

• Developing mood and focalization

• Establishing context, defying the barriers of genre, and playing with theme

• VOICE (because god damn it, someone has to set the record straight)

No, I’m not going to just hit you with a list of dead dudes and dusty timelines (though of course there will be some dead dudes because man they were good poets). I’ll also try to share what I think it means to be part of a poetic lineage of sorts and how that’s shaped by time, culture, language, war, longing, exile, sex, faith, love, power…you get the point.

I’ll try to elucidate the following:

• Global traditions you probably weren’t taught in school but should’ve been — poetry of the Vedas, Sufi mystics, Chinese hermits, Aztec priest-poets, Bhakti saints, and so many more.

• The modernists, the meta-modernists, Beats, Confessionals, Postcolonialists, New Formalists, the what-am-I supposed-to-call-these-beautiful-weirdos-ists

• How to read across centuries without getting bored or feeling dumb

• A few guiding questions: Who are your poetic ancestors? Who are your estranged cousins? Who do you wish you’d been born alongside? Who is doing the work you want to do?

I’ll be honest I don’t quite know how I’ll shape this fourth part and maybe it’ll break up into many parts later on, but I do know that I want to talk about:

• the present culture of poetry

• current poetry publishing dynamics

• viral/popular poetry

• how to edit your own poems

• how to tell if a poem is good or bad

• poetry communities

• how to write better poems

• a bit about submitting

• what you can do to enjoy reading poems again

• and then my own favorites and recommendations of the best of the best in poetry in the here and now

Alright, that’s all for now. I don’t know if any of you will be into this, maybe I’ll get a bunch of unsubscribes, but with all my heart, I don’t care. Writing, any kind of writing, ought to be an expression of our innermost desires as well as the momentary fleeting joys that stir us like the passing train did Marilyn’s skirt (iconic image she chose to do it don’t come at me).

I wouldn’t say teaching is my innermost desire, but I did want there to be something entirely free for other wanderers and beautiful losers in the recesses of the internet searching for some kinda literary nourishment without a price tag or a paid subscription or what-have-you.

Till next time, friends.

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