Poetry A La Carte

Get ready to serve up a tantalizing feast of poetry lessons. This comprehensive guide offers new ideas that will spur students' creative thinking and offer them new formats for poetry writing. A variety of unique opportunities for developing written and oral language are offered. Grades 5-8

Fair warning: this poetry does not rhyme.

Poems in English and Spanish.

A collection of poetry by James Hickey, a poet, thinker and do-er, although not necessarily in that order. He dresses like a stylish cowboy and carries a cane. He is honest most of the time, usually late for work and early for parties. He writes while drinking coffee and reflecting on the last nights and tomorrows. He does not always listen to what others say but feels it anyway. His poetry is dark and beautiful, like a city skyline, like Shiraz in its oaken home.

This anthology has a double aim: to present a body of poetry, none of it easily available, some of it never before reproduced, and to point up a particular trend, until now nearly lost sight of in the maze of generalizations about eighteenth-century French poetry. This trend, called individualist, in contradistinction to the academic and universalist trends of the century, has been chosen since it is the least known and most original of the three. The individualist poets are avowed moderns, and their attitude toward poetry and their concept of its nature often anticipate attitudes held by our poets of our own time. There has not been available to this point a sufficiently representative body of poems by these poets, a gap that Professors Finch and Joliat have attempts to fill with their anthology. Readers will find the notes to the poems especially useful, since many of them provide out-of-the-way background material and, as well, offer new insights into the poetry of the individualist poets as a group.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.