SHSU Common Reader 2021: Counting Descent

How to be a Poet combines advice, ideas and encouragement from experienced poets and editors in topical chapters to examine both the technical and creative dimensions of being a poet. It's a no-nonsense manual where we've replaced the spanners with lots of ink, elbow grease and edits.

Through detailed exercises, exemplars, and a breakdown of the key elements and considerations of personal writing, Faulkner and Squillante provide a lively introduction and guide for writers to the art and craft of personal writing. Their conversational tone about audience, point of view, form, structure, ethics, research, and finding and making time for writing practice is a not-to-miss primer and reference. Writing the Personal invites us all to find our stories and instructs us how to shape them for an audience and for ourselves.

A Poet's Craft transcends the limitations of current books, combining the best of three types of poetry-writing guides: textbooks for academic use, general guides to writing poetry, and guides to writing in form. Like textbooks, it includes poetry-writing exercises and discussion of classic and contemporary poems as examples, and is logically organized to provide a complete overview of the elements of poetry writing, from diction to trope to free verse.

Drawing on his extensive experience of poetry workshops and courses, Peter Sansom shows you not how to write but how to write better, how to write authentically, how to say genuinely what you genuinely mean to say. This practical guide is illustrated with many examples.

In Writing Poetry from the Inside Out, poet and national poetry workshop leader, Sandford Lyne, offers the writing exercises, guidance, and encouragement you need to find the poet inside you. We all can--and should--write poetry. Whether you are an experienced writer looking for new techniques and sources of inspiration or a novice poet who has never written a poem in your life, Writing Poetry from the Inside Out will help you to craft the poems you've always longed to write.

Poets have long been defending poetry in prose, and essays by Sidney, Shelley, and others are a familiar and important part of the Anglo-American literary tradition. This book identifies and examines a related genre - the verse defense of poetry - which shares the same impulse that has led to the composition of prose essays: namely, the desire to protect poetry from its detractors and to promote its value as a vital human endeavor. In the last century or so, this impulse to engage questions of poetry's value in poems has become increasingly widespread, and it has dominated the careers of at least five poets: H.D., Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, and Geoffrey Hill. Though these poets espouse very different aesthetic principles, they, like many of their contemporaries, have repeatedly turned to apology in their verse. At first glance, this seems an odd gesture, given that the readers and writers of poetry are those who least need convincing of poetry's worthiness. But questioning poetry in verse is a form of lyric introspection that is productive and well-suited for a modern poet. characterized as one of indifference, defense helps these authors make a claim for poetry's cultural relevance, as well as for its private profit. Jeannine Johnson is a Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University.

Unleash the Poem Within is about friendship, self-reflection and learning something new. It is, quite simply, about how the power of creativity can change your life.This book shows women how to liberate their creative spirit and use it not only as a means of self-expression, but as a way to find more calm, peace and an enhanced ability to see the value in each present moment. Wendy Nyemaster is the founder of the Poetry Posse, a group of ordinary women committed to writing and sharing their creativity as a way to enhance their lives. She guides the reader through twelve different poems and how to write them, and how doing so can unlock their inner power. Unleash the Poem Within shows women that by experimenting with creativity, they can find their voice and live their lives to the fullest.