Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poet-a-Day: Meet Benjamin Myers

By Tania Runyan 3 Comments

Bavaria Germany Trees and Water-Calliope Muse Poem

Poet-a-Day: Meet Benjamin Myers

Ben Myers has been a friend of mine for several years, and I’m a big fan of his work. That’s why I was delighted when he sent me a sestina that quickly became one of my favorite poems in How to Write a Form Poem. I’m partial to sestinas; you’ll learn that soon enough. But Myers brings the form to a whole new level by telling a story that flows so naturally from the telutons (the six repeating end words) that you forget about the technical agility that went into crafting the poem.

Here are the first two stanzas from “The Muse” to start you off. You’ll have to read the rest when you get your hands on a copy of How to Write a Form Poem.

How to Write a Form Poem-A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Forms-poetry writing book

The Muse (an excerpt)

Calliope, when she packed up and came
to Oklahoma, first went out and found
a calico white cotton dress, two out-
side baggy pockets on the front for stuffing tangled
wild onion stocks she gathered from the hills.
She hummed a bit and tried to look less holy.

On Sunday she would belt the hymns with holy-
rollers. They told her they were glad she came.
That’s where she met Hank Smith, who lived among the hills
of rusted junk outside of town. They found
a lot to talk about. He liked to comb her tangled
blonde hair and pick the burs and grass bits out …

—Benjamin Myers

Here’s what the poet himself has to say about “The Muse”:

Tania Runyan (TR): Tell me a little about the origin story of this poem.

Benjamin Myers (BM): The poem began when I started wondering about the narrative possibilities of the sestina form. I wanted to see if a kind of poem built on so much repetition could be used to tell a story, somehow using the repeated words to move the story forward rather than circling back around. I was basically just interested in that tension between pattern and progression.

TR: Why did you choose to write the poem as a sestina? Or did the form “cause” the poem?

BM: It really was a case of choosing the form first and then the poem following. This is only the second sestina I’ve published, and I was drawn to the challenges of the form and to the novelty of making it do something it usually doesn’t.

TR: What do you hope poets can learn from a book like How to Write a Form Poem?

BM: I hope they learn that form is alive and well, that sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas are not just for puffy-shirted dead poets who wrote with quills. I hope they learn to hear the contemporary possibilities in formal poems.

About Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers
Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of three books of poetry: Black Sunday (Lamar University Press, 2018), Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, Rattle, 32 Poems, Image, Nimrod and other literary journals as well as in magazines such as Oklahoma Today and The Christian Century.

He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His prose appears in World Literature Today, Books and Culture, First Things and other magazines. Myers teaches poetry writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature. His first book of nonfiction, A Poetics of Orthodoxy, was published in 2020 by Cascade Books.

Photo by Sonja und Jens, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan.

Browse more Poet-a-Day
Browse 50 States of Generosity
Check out The Yellow Wall-paper Graphic Novel

 
How to Write a Form Poem-A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Forms-poetry writing book

BUY ‘HOW TO WRITE A FORM POEM’ NOW!

5 star

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Tania Runyan
Tania Runyan
Tania Runyan lives in Lindenhurst, Illinois, a sort-of suburb, sort-of small town, where the deer and the minivans play. She's a 2011 NEA fellow and mama to four poetry books—A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, Delicious Air, and What Will Soon Take Place—and three (much cuter and noisier) human children. Tania is also the author of five non-fiction books—Making Peace with Paradise, How To Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, How to Write a Form Poem, and How to Write a College Application Essay. Visit her at TaniaRunyan.com
Tania Runyan
Latest posts by Tania Runyan (see all)
  • Flowers of California: California Poppy - December 8, 2022
  • Flowers of California: Lily of the Nile - October 13, 2022
  • Flowers of California: Crape Myrtle - October 5, 2022

Filed Under: Blog, How to Write a Form Poem, Poet-a-Day, poetry teaching resources, Sestina

Try Every Day Poems...

About Tania Runyan

Tania Runyan lives in Lindenhurst, Illinois, a sort-of suburb, sort-of small town, where the deer and the minivans play. She's a 2011 NEA fellow and mama to four poetry books—A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, Delicious Air, and What Will Soon Take Place—and three (much cuter and noisier) human children. Tania is also the author of five non-fiction books—Making Peace with Paradise, How To Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, How to Write a Form Poem, and How to Write a College Application Essay. Visit her at TaniaRunyan.com

Comments

  1. Glynn says

    May 4, 2021 at 6:22 am

    Your can read reviews of his poetry collections here:

    Black Sunday: https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2019/02/19/poets-and-poems-benjamin-myers-and-black-sunday/

    Lapse Americana: https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2013/05/28/poetry-review-the-submerged-depths-of-lapse-americana/

    Wonderful poems. Black Sunday is a personal favorite.

    Reply
  2. L.L. Barkat says

    May 4, 2021 at 1:34 pm

    Funny: I didn’t put two and two together about this poem’s “Muse” title and Calliope until one night watching a Supernatural episode that featured… Calliope. Perfect. 🙂

    Love the poem!

    Reply
  3. Ahmad Jahangheer says

    May 22, 2023 at 6:40 pm

    Thankyou So Much For this Good Information

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy