Top 5 books to inspire you to write poetry, chosen by Deborah Alma

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/books/top-5-books-write-poetry-deborah-alma/

Wordsworth’s poem is delivered by a strong speaker, but not a very intimate one by our standards. Contemporary poetry, and the poetry of twentieth-century America, shifted the footing of much poetry to the conversational and the highly mobile speech register of one ordinary person speaking confidentially to another. Here is the opening to Eleanor Lerman’s poem “Ode to Joy”: Four drinks after nine o’