Books of Poetry Form.
Highlights of Poetry.
Index of poetry.
How to Write Your Poetry.
How to Listen to Poetry. Recommended books on Reading Poetry. |
Log of books read. |
Other exercises: Index. Spell casting. "Alien". write a poem like Billy Collins. |
Jump-start your writing with ideas from our essays on form:
Forms of skaldic verse.
Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle. |
Other poets:
Adam Zagajewski. Billy Collins. Franz Wright. Jack Gilbert. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Richard Hugo's Triggering Town. W.S. Merwin. |
Nine Horses (2003)
by Billy Collins.
Delicious. His balance of lightness and depth pulls us into his poems which are not, despite their candy-like payoffs, superficial. |
Buy and read and re-read Nine Horses (2003) or any other collection by Billy Collins. His poems are your role models.
Also BUY The Best American Poetry: 2006, edited by Billy Collins. Study his criteria for selecting poetry for The Best American Poetry: 2006.
You are going to write a poem with many of the features of a Billy Collins poem.
Begin by reading all the poems in at least one of his books. As you read jot down three or four characteristics that you admire and that appear in several of the poems.
Below we give you a list of some features that we picked out.
Then we'll show you how to start and how to continue.
Here are some of the features of a Billy Collins poem. For your first exercise, plan to use every one of these in your first draft. You can cut the less successful features when you revise.
"how fatuous, how off base of Whistler" (p.101) |
Here we go. Time to start using the features in your work.
"Every since I woke up today" (p.14) |
"This morning as I walked along the lakeshore" (p.17) |
"Long into the night my pencil" (p.86) |
"In a rush this weekday morning" (p.101) |
"a song has been playing uncontrollably" (p.14) |
"I fell in love with a wren" (p.17) |
"hurried across the page" (p.86) |
"I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery" (p.101) |
Highlights of Poetry. Poetry index. |
Copyright
© 2004-2014 by J. Zimmerman.
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