Related pages:
Poetry index. Books on How to Read. Books on How to Write. How to Listen. How to Write - A Recipe. |
How to write specific forms:
Haibun.
Haiku.
Hay(na)ku.
Rengay.
Tanka.
Ghazal. Pantoum. Sestina. Sonnet. Villanelle. |
Books of Poetry Form. Kim Addonizio. |
Check out these Best books on writing poetry - books you can use without paying the big bucks for an MFA program:
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Highly recommended. Brimming with clear and practical exercises, Kowit's book is the best 'How to' book to help you start writing poetry. My favorite chapter ('first among equals') is Chapter 5 on Awful Poems, where Kowit leads us cheerily through the frequent mistakes that appear in our poems, with exercises to correct them. |
Altogether Kowit gives us 30 chapters, in the areas of:
How to Begin.
Memory (memory being the loam in which
so many of our poems are rooted).
The Secret of Writing (no, I won't tell you - read the book).
Music and Metaphor (excellent for making your poems more memorable).
Experiment and Tradition (rich with ideas and approaches to both
recent and classic forms of poetry).
Themes (including the political, the desired, and the lost).
Read a chapter a day for a month. Each day, think about one of the exercises
in the chapter you last read. At the end of the day (or the start of the next
morning) write what comes up -- maybe it will be a poem, or at least a first draft.
After such a month you may well be ready to put into practice the final chapters of:
Nuts and Bolts on poetry workshops and publishing your poetry.
Recommended with enthusiasm. The Poet's Companion does the essential job of helping us generate work. (In the middle of reading the second page, I put it down for 15 minutes to rough-draft a new poem!) |
The book's sections are:
This collection of over 90 poetry-writing exercises is presented in a sequence of brief (1-or-2-page) essays to inspire both the experienced and the budding poet. Behen and Chase Twichell constructed the book by soliciting and then compiling favorite writing exercises from hundreds of poets. |
Their introduction includes a helpful summary of the value of exercises, which can be a powerful scaffold that eventually falls away as a writer's genuine poem takes flight from an exercise. The contributions are grouped as:
Sadly, this book has almost no sample poems. I prefer Steve Kowit's, which has more continuity, and which includes lots of neighborly poems to illustrate his topics and help jump-start the reader-poet.
Koch celebrates the language of poetry as a separate language, and thereby clarifies how poems are written and can be read. Entrancing selection of poems from Sappho (7th century B.C.) through Li Bai (8th century C.E.) to Arthur Rimbaud (19th century), plus many modern poems. No explicit exercises. |
This is the famous book wherein Anne Lamott shows you how to find your passion, your voice, your first draft (no matter how feeble), and your publication-ready manuscript. |
Related pages:
Poetry index. Books on How to Read. Books on How to Write. How to Listen. How to Write - A Recipe. |
How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. |
Books of Poetry Form. |
Copyright © 2002-2017 by J. Zimmerman. |