Synopses & Reviews
A Poet's Guide to Poetry brings Mary Kinzie's 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. Using examples from the major traditions of lyric and meditative poetry in English from the medieval period to the present, Kinzie considers the sounds and rhythms of poetry along with the ideas and thought-units within poems. Kinzie shares her own successful classroom tactics—encouraging readers to approach a poem as if it were provisional.
The three parts of A Poet's Guide to Poetry lead the reader through a carefully planned introduction to the ways we understand poetry. The first section provides careful, step-by-step instruction to familiarize students with the formal elements of poems, from the most obvious feature through the most devious.
Part I presents the style, grammar, and rhetoric of poems with a wealth of examples from various literary periods.
Part II discusses the way the elements of a poem are controlled in time through a careful explanation and exploration of meter and rhythm. The "four freedoms" of free verse are also examined.
Part III closes the book with helpful practicum chapters on writing in form. Included here are writing exercises for beginning as well as advanced writers, a dictionary of poetic terms replete with poetry examples, and an annotated bibliography for further explanatory reading.
This useful handbook is an ideal reference for literature and writing students as well as practicing poets.
About the Author
Mary Kinzieis a poet and critic. She is professor of English and director of creative writing at Northwestern University, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Poetry Award.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Enchantment of the Work
Writing the Poem You Read: A View of the Artistic Process
Part I: The Elements of Relation and Resemblance
Line and Half-Meaning
Syntax and Whole Meaning
Diction and Layers in Meaning
Trope and Thought
Rhetoric and Speech
Rhythm as Combination
Part II: The Elements, Controlled in Time
Accentual-Syllabic Meter: The Role of Stress and Interval
Stanza and Rhyme: The Role of Echo
Further Rhythms in English—Counted Forms: Accentual Verse and Syllabic Verse (including Haiku)
Further Rhythms in English—Non-Counted Forms:
The Four Freedoms of Free Verse
Part III: Writing in Form
Exercises for Beginning and Advanced Writers
Poetic Terms
Annotated Bibliography of Further Reading