Creative Writing: ENGL 2620 Poetry Writing

This books is an updated version of the classic on poetry forms.

Mary Kinzie brings her decades of 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. Kinzie considers the sounds and rhythms of poetry along with the ideas and thought-units within poems.

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.

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge is a poet and teacher who conducts workshops privately, as well as in the California Poets in the Schools program. Her exuberant, critically acclaimed teaching guide takes instructors, writers, and general readers into the very heart and intensity of life and the craft of expressing what one feels through the written word.

True creativity flows continually throughout life, breaking free of form. Stephen Lloyd Webber shares his practice of creative writing as a path for self-realization. This book includes many practical writing exercises and connects readers with esoteric tantric yoga insights, oral traditions, and Zen storytelling modalities.

Separating the making of poems from critical thinking about them is a false divide. Students should delve deeper into their work by becoming accomplished critics and active readers of poetic texts. The book presents a range of strategies and practical exercises to help initiate and sustain the process of making poems, while also demonstrating the value of activities such as memorizing poems, reading and writing about poetic traditions, developing manifestos and statements of aesthetics, and composing self-reviews which place poems within critical context.

This is the ultimate collection of rhyming words and technique from a master of wordplay. This essential comprehensive resource for poets and songwriters is back in print with expanded material on rhyming and word usage.

Stephen Dobyns provides a helpful framework for creating poetry and navigates contemporary concerns and practices. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work,