As poetry workshops proliferate, so do poetry handbooks. A species of the genus the "how to" book, the poetry handbook shows its readers how to write a poem, and in the case of The Poet's Companion that poem is the generic autobiographical one that is the staple of most workshops and too many poetry journals. The Companion's authors, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, are themselves the products and teachers of workshops, and both have published many autobiographical poems.

Their "Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry," as they have subtitled their book, thus focuses on the pleasures of versifying about the self. Accordingly, in the first part of their book, entitled "Subjects for Writing," the second of its seven chapters is called "The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle." And the first illustrative poem offered in this chapter is Carolyn Forché's "The Morning Baking." While this poem represents one of the more successful examples of the subspecies the grandmother poem, some readers of poetry devoutly wish to avoid another of these as much as another sestina. Indeed, The Chariton Review, in its entry in Poet's Market (1997), rules out the submission of "more 'relativism':...poetry centered around relatives." And The Ledge, which I co-edit, awarded second prize in its 1995 poetry contest to Bob Dial's satiric "No More Grandmothers," which laments " All these damned grandmothers,/given a second chance at life":

                                                      once out,
   they knit and cook and dust
with a vicious abandon they never
   knew before.

Further, he found suitable forms for his odes and composed them with an artistry that has inspired poets ever since. Yet the subject of poetic form comes up in The Poet's Companion only in chapter thirteen, "Meter, Rhyme, and Form." One doesn't have to be a formalist to wonder how students inexperienced with poetry can write about even themselves without being given any instruction in form. In chapter ten, "The Music of the Line," readers are told, "There are no real rules for line breaks...[T]hink of line breaks as effects." But good poets create their own rules for breaking lines, especially in free verse, or the utter randomness of line breaks results in what Edmund Wilson called "shredded prose." While logic seems to dictate that the discussion of the line would be linked with that of form, two chapters intervene, one on "Voice and Style" and one entitled "Stop Making Sense: Dreams and Experiments."

To their credit, once Addonizio and Laux address meter, rhyme, and form, they endorse their value, even for poets who choose to write free verse. But because our authors devote only three pages to "traditional forms" and then discuss only the sonnet, they leave the impression that they are making only an obligatory bow to formal poetry. They themselves, after all, write free verse, and they probably had to make a quick study of forms, so quick that they repeatedly refer to the "octet," rather than the "octave," of the Italian sonnet. (Another sign of the times is that their Norton editors don't know the difference, either.)

In the "Ideas for Writing"-a feature that concludes each chapter-in form, one suggestion concerns blank verse. Readers are advised first to "read a lot" of it, and are given the examples of "Shakespeare's plays," Paradise Lost, and a few twentieth-century blank-verse poems, before being admonished, "Don't write anything until you've spent at least half an hour reading." The notion that anyone could so quickly absorb the music and technique of blank verse as to then be able to write it, only underscores the book's fundamental devaluation of form. So does the instruction to write "a limerick (you remember limericks, don't you?)." Since this is the only reference to the limerick in the book, the authors now expect their inexperienced reader somehow to be familiar with a complex form and its prosody.

In a later chapter on the villanelle, pantoum, and sestina, they ignore the triolet, a much shorter form that could serve as an introduction to its formal sisters the villanelle and the pantoum. Also ignored here are the haiku and the cinquain, which have the additional virtue for beginners of being unrhymed. These brief forms would be more in keeping with "the pleasures of writing poetry" than the long, formally complex sestina, which they illustrate with Dana Gioia's feebly satiric, prosy "My Confessional Sestina." It's worth noting that Marilyn Hacker recently wrote of her displeasure, when editing The Kenyon Review, at receiving loads of bad sestinas from students of poetry workshops. Since probably fewer memorable sestinas have been written than excellent poems in any other fixed form, workshop teachers and handbook writers would be wise to mention this sad truth about the sestina and leave it at that.

Another cause for concern is the low level at which The Poet's Companion is pitched. The authors presumably address an audience with no literary background at all. As a result, they speak of "Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy," "writer Raymond Carver," and "the psychologist Carl Jung." Somehow the tag "the English Romantic poet" is omitted before Keats's name. More important, only two lines of Keats's poetry are quoted. (His name does not appear in the index.) And when The Poet's Companion does quote an entire poem, any analysis of it tends to be superficial. Thus after presenting Patricia Smith's "Skinhead" as an example of "Voice and Style," the book observes about its bigoted speaker that "we can hear and feel his hate and anger" but offers no insight into how the poet's language evokes these emotions. Moreover, all examples are drawn from living poets. Addonizio and Laux pay only lip service to the value of earlier poets, like Keats or Dickinson, and like many writers of their generation (born in the '50s), they espouse "presentism," a belief in the superiority of contemporary art and a shunning of the master works of earlier times.

In their presentism, their devotion to free verse at the expense of form, and their focus on the autobiographical poem, Addonizio and Laux reveal their faith in "workshopism." This is the belief that poetry is not an art but a craft that can be taught, like carpentry or knitting, though the product rarely achieves the value of a well-made cabinet or sweater. Yet a workshopped Keats would be a very different poet from the one who merits at least a mention in The Poet's Companion.

Though he took workshops at Stanford, Robert Stone, who now teachers a fiction workshop at Yale, learned to write "the old-fashioned way,...from reading," among other masters, Conrad and Dos Passos. "Unfortunately," he says, "you can't teach anyone to write. It comes from God" (The New York Times, 26 May 1998).

But if Norton, the powerhouse textbook publisher, has its way, and hundreds of creative writing teachers adopt The Poet's Companion, it will become the Word of the Church of Workshopism. In the long run, however, the book and its disciples will have little if any impact on poetry, which will remain an art to which poets who are willing to learn by reading are called, not made in workshops.