Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Your Life Experiences

by Sheila Bender

Encouraging readers to write everything from dream journals and postcards to lists and clustered phrases, Sheila Bender gently teaches readers how to use words that show instead of tell, whilst avoiding general words that categorise.'

Genres: Writing, Poetry

220 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Sheila Bender is the founder of Writingitreal.com. She teaches online and in-person offering classes and writing consults by Zoom as well.

Her passion is to facilitate those who write from personal experience. Visit her at WritingItReal.com and look for her classes as well at Il Chiostro, Women on Writing, and the International Association for Journal Writing.

Reviews

[Kathy Stinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always fun to get more ideas for exercises to help develop one’s craft. Seeing the movement from exercise result to shaped poem also helpful. As was what the author had to say about line breaks. I’ve always just taken a stab at making them intuitively which has at times been effective but it’s good to have some principles in my pocket for when I’m feeling less than satisfied or just need to look at whether I might do something differently.

[Stefani Akins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a bit torn about this book. While I find the exercises presented therein useful enough to try to get a copy of the book, I generally disagree with Ms Bender's idea of what poetry should aim to achieve. It's sad that nobody bothered to publish an updated edition of "Writing Personal Poetry"; most of the information in the later chapters seems a bit out of date nearly 20 years after first publication.