Review: The Point of Poetry, Joe Nutt

Note: I exchanged a free copy of this book in exchange for review.

I learned a new word as a result of this book - metrophobia, or the fear of poetry. As Joe Nutt hypothesises, most fear of poetry comes from a simple lack of understanding of poetry itself, or the point of it. The current way of teaching about it in secondary schools can also be a contributing factor - my own memory of learning about poetry at secondary school, (although it vastly improved at A Level as a result of my fantastic teacher), is simply analysing line by line, looking for poetic techniques to PEE (point, evidence, explain) to death, rather than looking at it holistically and most importantly, placing it in context.

What Joe Nutt is basically present what poetry teaching at school should look like, right down to not even putting the poem of each chapter at the beginning - they are, very deliberately, placed at the end. What this allows the reader to do is understand the context of the poem, a bit about the poet's life, and links to aspects of other poets and the culture of the time. Thus, by the time you get to the poem itself, you're more armed, so to speak, to fully enjoy the poem and also be able to technically read it better (e.g. The Prelude by Wordsworth).

Nutt's love and passion for poetry bleeds from the pages. I'd never disliked poetry as such, but I wouldn't really picture myself sitting down and reading and thinking about a book of poems, rather than a novel. This book has changed that for me. For example, I picked up a copy of Paradise Lost from my bookshelf, took a quick scan, and thought that I would never be able to make it through. The last chapter of Nutt's book has shown me that I can, although it would be wiser to take it in small chunks.

There were some things that Nutt said that I found myself disagreeing on, (see the part about 'safe spaces' at universities, as I think the whole concept has been unhelpfully trivialised), but for the most part, I connected to what he was saying, not just about the poems but the politics and culture that go along with it.

If you never got along with poetry at school, this is definitely a book to get you back into it. And for those who love poetry, anyway, this book will just be like a good conversation with an old friend.