Accent on Meter by
"This book provides high school and college classroom teachers (and students) with a handy, carefully explained guide to meta in poetry. The 600 contains lots of examples of poems--the authors scan some and explain their decisions-and they also offer poems for the reader to practice on. They also include a helpful glossary of poetry terms."
A Broken Thing: poets on the line by
In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form , and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line . But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee's anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century.
Rosko and Vander Zee's introduction offers a generous overview of conversations about the line from the Romantics forward. We come to see how the line might be an engine for ideals of progress--political, ethical, or otherwise. For some poets, the line touches upon the most fundamental questions of knowledge and existence. More than ever, the line is the radical against which even alternate and emerging poetic forms that foreground the visual or the auditory, the page or the screen, can be distinguished and understood. From the start, a singular lesson emerges: lines do not form meaning solely in their brevity or their length, in their becoming or their brokenness; lines live in and through the descriptions we give them. Indeed, the history of American poetry in the twentieth century could be told by the compounding, and often confounding, discussions of its lines. A Broken Thing both reflects upon and extends this history, charting a rich diffusion of theory and practice into the twenty-first century with the most diverse, wide-ranging and engaging set of essays to date on the line in poetry, revealing how poems work and why poetry continues to matter.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry by
Discover the poet within! You've read poetry that has touched your heart, and you'd like to improve your own writing technique. But even though you have loads of inspiration, you're discovering that good instruction can be as elusive as a good metaphor. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry will help you compose powerful, emotion-packed poems that you can be proud of. You'll learn simple explanations of poetry building blocks such as metaphor, imagery, symbolism and stanzas; steps to the poetic process; easy-to-follow guidelines for writing sonnets, sestinas, narrative poems and more; fun exercises to help you master the basics of poetry writing; cliches and other poetry pitfalls to avoid; advice on writers' conferences and workshops; tips on getting your poetry published; good poems that will inspire your own work; strategies to beat writer's block.
Getting the Knack: 20 poetry writing exercises 20 by
Introduces different kinds of poems, including headline, letter, recipe, list, and monologue, and provides exercises in writing poems based on both memory and imagination.
Giving Their Word by
Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of the most influential poets writing today. Their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy. Included are conversations with William Stafford, Mary Oliver, John Montague, Charles Simic, Seamus Heancy, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Forche, Martin Espada, Marge Piercy, Rita Dove, and Bei Dao. In the book's closing interview, Steven Ratiner makes a return visit to Donald Hall's New Hampshire farm shortly before the publication of Hall's collection Without, which focused on the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Giving their word is what poets do; it is their stock-in-trade, their daily bread. In the hands of the most accomplished, a poet's words are transformed into a kind of window: looking inward toward the territory of memory, dream, personal mythology and opening out onto the landscape of the shared world where life and work are rooted. For each poet there is an intricate relationship between t
How to Haiku: a writer's guide to haiku and related forms by
Transform daily experiences into poetry and art with this How-to Haiku instruction book. It discusses the nature of haiku and helps readers/writers cultivate insight and joy in ordinary, daily life. Included are examples and instruction on related poetry forms such as the Haibun and the Tanka.
Nine Gates: entering the mind of poetry : essays by
A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.
Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.
A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. Nine Gates is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world -- alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.
In part a primer for the general reader, Nine Gates is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, Nine Gates is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.
Planet on the Table: Poets on the reading life by
"The tone may vary from one essay to another, but more than anything else, these are love stories, not rose-colored romances, but love that includes doubt, violence, wrestling with angels, and devils."-From the IntroductionCONTRIBUTORS: Eavan Boland Madeline DeFrees Stephen Dunn Reginald Gibbons Edward Hirsch Maxine Kumin J.D. McClatchy Carl Phillips Stanley Plumly Mary Ruefle Adam Zagajewski and many others!
The Poem's Heartbeat: a manual of prosody by
The Poem's Heartbeat is a progressive, step-by-step introduction to prosody--the art and science of metrical composition in poetry. This second edition includes a new appendix of sample scansions, and a comprehensive index of poets and poems cited. "This intelligent, user-friendly book is a quality guide to rhyme, rhythm, meter, and form for students, experienced readers, and practitioners of poetry... The Poem's Heartbeat may well be the finest general book available on prosody."-Library Journal (starred review) "In lucid prose, Corn clears a straight path through the scansion of quantitative verse and free verse... A provocative, definitive manual on meter."Publishers Weekly "A lively and well-informed primer to prosody, a current hot topic in poetic studies. Corn's aim is to introduce the novice poet or student to the vocabulary and understanding of English prosody, from its basic rules and definitions to the complexities of how sound is measured in poetry. Recommended for all academic libraries, this book could only have been written by someone who cares about the details, the relation of sound to sense, and fine, clear expression."-Choice "The Poem's Heartbeat triumphs over the dryness-or supposed dryness-of the subject, treating every aspect of it with precision, dispatch, and apt illustration. That it is sorely needed in the present footless state of things goes without saying."-Richard Wilbur
The Poetry Home Repair Manual: practical advice for beginning poets by
Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual , Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets--aspiring or practicing--can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry's ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts. Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend--a friend who is willing to share everything he's learned about the art he's spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.
Poetry in Person: Twenty-five years of conversation with America's poets by
"In the fall of 1970, at the New School in Greenwich Village, a new teacher posted a flyer on the wall," begins Alexander Neubauer's introduction to this remarkable book. "It read 'Meet Poets and Poetry, with Pearl London and Guests.'" Few students responded. No one knew Pearl London, the daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster, cofounder of Simon & Schuster. But the seminar's first guests turned out to be John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creely. Soon W. S. Merwin followed, then Mark Strand and Galway Kinnell.
London invited poets to bring their drafts to class, to discuss their work in progress and the details of vision and revision that brought a poem to its final version. From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, including Amy Clampitt, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and Charles Simic, the book follows an extraordinary range of poets as they create their poems and offers numerous illustrations of the original drafts, which bring their processes to light. With James Merrill, London discusses autobiography and subterfu≥ with Galway Kinnell, his influential notion that the new nature poem must include the city and not exclude man; with June Jordan, "Poem in Honor of South African Women" and the question of political poetry and its uses. Published here for the first time, the conversations are intimate, funny, irreverent, and deeply revealing. Many of the drafts under discussion--Robert Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas," Edward Hirsch's "Wild Gratitude," Robert Pinsky's "The Want Bone"--turned into seminal works in the poets' careers.
There has never been a gathering like Poetry in Person , which brings us a wealth of understanding and unparalleled access to poets and their drafts, unraveling how a great poem is actually made.
The Poet's Companion: a guide to the pleasures of writing poetry by
The Poet's Companion presents brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing, each followed by distinctive writing exercises. The ups and downs of writing life--including self-doubt and writer's block--are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.
A Poet's Guide to Poetry by
A Poet's Guide to Poetry brings Mary Kinzie's expertise as poet, critic, and director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University to bear in a comprehensive reference work for any writer wishing to better understand poetry. Detailing the formal concepts of poetry and methods of poetic analysis, she shows how the craft of writing can guide the art of reading poems. Using examples from the major traditions of lyric and meditative poetry in English from the medieval period to the present, Kinzie considers the sounds and rhythms of poetry along with the ideas and thought-units within poems. Kinzie shares her own successful classroom tactics--encouraging readers to approach a poem as if it were provisional.
Range of the Possible: conversations with contemporary poets by
A collection of interviews with American poets by Tod Marshall.
Singing School: learning to write (and read) poetry by studying with the masters by
Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made-- in terms borrowed from the "singing school" of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."
Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works: William Carlos Williams's "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens's "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.
This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.