Creating Poetry

Poets can't impose their will on the muse. That's why it's so important that you write regularly, keep reworking your drafts, and experiment in your writing. This book will help you by offering advice, inspiration, and hundreds of exercises to get you going—all designed to invoke your muse. With no bias toward any form or style, John Drury addresses imagery, metaphor, and the different methods of constructing and experimenting with new poetic forms. You'll find twelve chapters overflowing with examples, exercises, and prompts—all practical tools you can use right now in your poetry writing. For example, you'll find information on: Preparing: developing your poetic sensitivity Language: learning the fundamental tools of poetry and using them effectively Sight: refining sight—and insight—to make your poetry come alive within the mind's eye—and the heart's eye, too Sound: sensitizing yourself to the music of words—both singly and in combination Movement: developing the rhythmic qualities that make poems sing—and shout, march, croon, and whisper Voice: becoming aware of the fine nuances of how the words are said and connected, revealing each poem's implied speaker and "stance" Finishing: bringing each poem to successful completion No matter what your style or level of experience, Creating Poetry offers insightful, thoughtful, and motivating instruction all of which will make your path to poetry writing a richer path to travel.

Introduces the different kinds of poetry and the mechanics of writing poetry, providing an opportunity for the reader to experience the joy of making a poem.

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Making Poetry Matter draws together contributions from leading scholars in the field to offer a variety of perspectives on poetry pedagogy. A wide range of topics are covered including: - Teacher attitudes to teaching poetry in the urban primary classroom - Digital poetry and multimodality - Resistance to poetry in Post-16 English Throughout, the internationally recognised contributors draw on case studies to ensure that the theory is clearly linked to classroom practice. They consider the teaching and learning challenges that poetry presents for those working with learners aged between 5 and 19 and explore these challenges with reference to reading; writing; speaking and listening and the transformative nature of poetry in different contexts.

The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada gathers together primary literary documents including manifestos, reviews, critical essays, and recollections to illustrate the most significant developments in the rise of modernist English Canadian poetry. Rather than present exclusively academic criticism, the editors have carefully selected original texts by the principal figures of modernism to offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at twentieth-century poetry in Canada. Collecting several decades of writings by luminaries beginning with pivotal essays by John Sutherland and A.J.M. Smith, and including George Bowering, Northop Frye, Irving Layton, P.K. Page, F.R. Scott, Raymond Souster, and William Carlos Williams, this volume also provides explanatory notes to guide the reader and to evaluate the significance of each piece in its literary and historical context. This classic work of Canadian literary studies is now back in print with a substantial new introduction and appendices by Michael Gnarowski, who explains and interprets the essence of key initiatives in the unfolding of a modernist point of view. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada offers a comprehensive chronological path from the earliest examples of Canadian modernism to the beginning of the postmodern period.

Revised edition of a handbook for creative writing and poetry. First published in 1987 it is aimed at secondary and tertiary levels. Explores sources of ideas for poetry, drafting as a creative process and different forms that poems can take. Sections of the book dealing with sound, imagery and structure have been updated. Author has been publishing his poetry for over 30 years and was awarded the 2001 NSW Premier's Prize for services to Australian literature. Other books include 'The Habit of Balance' and 'Halfway to Eden'.

How to begin a poem, use word combinations and new forms, apply the lessons from master poets to individual poems, choose and use images and words carefully, and much more.