poetry craft books:
A Poet's Craft: a comprehensive guide to making and sharing your poetry by
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.
A Poetry Handbook by
With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built--meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. She talks of iambs and trochees, couplets and sonnets, and howand why this should matter to anyone writing or reading poetry. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that's what she sayspoetrycan do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook."--Los Angeles Times
Poets Companion 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.
The New Book of Forms by
A handbook of poetics discussing all aspects of verse composition & describing over 300 verse forms with examples & schematic diagrams.
Madness, Rack, and Honey by
This is one of the wisest books I've read in years... --New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act--the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back... Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle's work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that's vital and welcome, that doesn't make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon Review Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny...These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused... --Publishers Weekly This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. --Matthew Dickman The accomplished poet is humorous and self-deprecating in this collection of illuminating essays on poetry, aesthetics and literature... --San Francisco Examiner Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential,Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter--and utterly pleasurable--immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.
How to Be a Poet by
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. At each step, we ask plenty of questions – what makes a poem tick over perfectly, how do we get it started when it stalls, and which warning lights should you never ignore? Aimed at both new and more established poets, there is plenty for everyone here. How to be a Poet covers topics that range from redrafting poems and getting them published, to learning to pay attention and look and listen like a poet. There is practical advice on everything from getting over writer's block, getting it wrong and making peace with poetry, to performing live, experimenting with poetic form and using social media. This handbook aims to provoke, inspire and challenge poets of all forms – and encourage you to read widely, write fearlessly and actively participate in the life-changing, life-enhancing force for good that is poetry.
Writing Not Writing by
The poet George Oppen comments, "There are situations which cannot honorably [be] met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning." To write poetry under such circumstances, he continues, "would be a treason to one's neighbor." Committing himself, then, to more direct and conventional forms of response and responsibility, Oppen leaves poetry behind for twenty-five years. The disasters of the 1930s, for Oppen, put poetry into a fundamental question that could not be resolved or overcome. Yet if crisis is continual, then poetry is always turning away from the neighbor in need, always an irresponsible response in a world persistently falling apart. Writing Not Writing both confirms this question into which crisis puts poetry and explores alternative modes of "response" and "responsibility" that poetry makes possible. Reading the silences of Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Bob Kaufman, the renunciation of Laura Riding, and other more contemporary instances of poetic abnegation, Tom Fisher explores silence, refusal, and disavowal as political and ethical modes of response in a time of continuous crisis. Through a turn away from writing, these poets offer strategies of refusal and departure that leave anagrammatical hollows behind, activating the negational capacities of writing and aesthetics to disrupt the empire of sense, speech, and agency. Fisher's work is both an engaging and detailed analysis of four individual poets who left poetry behind and a theoretically provocative exploration of the political and ethical possibilities of silence, not-doing, and disavowal. In lucid but nuanced terms, Fisher makes the case that, from at least modernism forward, poetry is marked by refusals of speech and sense in order to open possibilities of response outside conventional forms of responsibility.
My Trade Is Mystery by
An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture "Illuminating, deeply endearing essays."--Ron Charles, Washington Post "A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers."--Diego Báez, Booklist In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an "apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered." Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community. In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips's book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.
theory of poetics:
With the Witnesses by
While trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary literary and cultural studies as an ethical way to study depictions of suffering, there is a risk that its present use could cause more harm than good. By emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory may lead readers to claim others' suffering through empathic identification. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry offers an alternative approach to engage with not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Examining the strategies of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant models of trauma studies in which readers take over the witnessing position by identifying with the speaker as a witness. If the purpose of reading such poetry is to contribute to a chain of witnesses, what is the distinct role of a reader, and how does it differ from the role of the poem's speaker? Tracy proposes that metonymy - a logic of nearness rather than likeness - is compassion's formal manifestation. Analyzing poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing speakers invite readers. Poems that respond to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses toward a compassionate response to suffering that involves feeling with - not as - another. Following each poem as a unique theory of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems hold suffering signed as art, not claimable traces of suffering.
Women's Poetry and Popular Culture by
Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).
Poetry, Consciousness and Community by
The process of poetry has importantly intuitive aspects and poetry embodies an ambivalence towards consciousness and towards those activities of thought in which it is constituted. It was ability to favour doubt over the productions of the rational mind that led Keats to associate poetry with his `negative capability¿. Consciousness is ¿ like poetry ¿ a floating signifier, a term of wide reference, and with a range of implications in the various disciplinary contexts in which it finds currency. Poetry, consciousness and community is about poetry, consciousness and community, about their reflexive relationships in process, and about how these relationships matter to the world today and to worlds to come. This book is interested in the nature of poetic, as opposed to other, thought; it is interested in the critical application of these forms of thought to each others¿ productions, and in how poetic thought might or might not be subject to its own regime. Poetry ¿ as practice of testing the limits of language ¿ entails a reflexive goal: that of understanding the journey in words made possible for, and by, the poem. Poetic meaning and truth are revealed between languages (likewise between genres, between texts, between subjects); it is in this inter-subjective and inter-cultural space that the limits of language (and so of conceivable worlds) are found.
The Poetic Imperative by
This book aims to expand our sense of poetry's reach and potential impact. It is an effort at recouping the poetic imperative buried within the first taxonomic description of human being: "nosce te ipsum," or "know yourself." Johanna Skibsrud explores both poetry and human being not as fixed categories but as active processes of self-reflection and considers the way that human being is constantly activated within and through language and thinking. By examining a range of modern and contemporary poets including Wallace Stevens, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Anne Carson, all with an interest in playfully disrupting sense and logic and eliciting unexpected connections, The Poetic Imperative highlights the relationship between the practice of writing and reading and a broad tradition of speculative thought. It also seeks to demonstrate that the imperative "know yourself" functions not only as a command to speak and listen, but also as a call to action and feeling. The book argues that poetic modes of knowing - though central to poetry understood as a genre - are also at the root of any conscious effort to move beyond the subjective limits of language and selfhood in the hopes of touching upon the unknown. Engaging and erudite, The Poetic Imperative is an invitation to direct our attention simultaneously to the finite and embodied limits of selfhood, as well as to what those limits touch: the infinite, the Other, and truth itself.
Reference Databases & Books
The Greenwood encyclopedia of American poets and poetry
The Facts on File companion to British poetry 19th century
Contemporary gay American poets and playwrights : an A-to-Z guide
Contemporary American women poets : an A-to-Z guide
Search with Subject Headings
Subject headings provide an easy way to find books on a topic (broad or narrow); they can also help you to discover narrower topic ideas.
Because Poetry is so broad, subject headings are numerous. Below are a few broad options you can start with:
To browse subject headings, go to the library catalog and click "Browse" in the box on the right side of the page. Enter a heading into the box provided, then click the "subject" button.
Tip: Browsing for "poetry" will start you out in a list of time periods, like "poetry 20th century." Browsing for "poetry m" will skip past these time periods into topics, like "Poetry Medieval History and Criticism."
You can also browse the subject search for Poets. Browsing using this term will break down the poets into time periods & countries.
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