Cloud View Poets: An Anthology--Master Classes with David St. John [Paperback]

David St. John (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2005

In a series of master classes on the craft of poetry, over 80 poets in groups of 15 have been meeting with award winning poet, David St. John, since 2001. There are over 12 master classes a year. The experience has been rich and rewarding. In this antholoogy, the Cloud View Poets present some of their finest work polished and honed by these seminars.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

from the Preface to Cloud View Poets Anthology (it is) breathtaking to see how each voice was tempered by such verbal grace and exquisite poise...What is astonishing to me in these poems is the level of accomplishment coupled with stylistic diversity, as well as the imagistic precision, as these poets effect an extraordinary reclamation of experience through the voices of memory and the reflections of a personal present...The Cloud View Poetry Master Classes is a community dedicated both to artistic safety (the permission to bring the materials of one's life to one's art) and to artistic risk (the desire to take chances as a writer and to expand that art). It has been the most satisfying teaching of my life. David St. John is a much honored and awarded poet with many poetry collections, the latest being Prism, and The Face. He is Head of the Literature Department at the University of Southern California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Arctos Press (July 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972538445
• ISBN-13: 978-0972538442
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,323,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An impressively diverse collection of 82 poets, August 10, 2005

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cloud View Poets: An Anthology--Master Classes with David St. John (Paperback)

Selected, compiled and edited by the team of Morley Clark, Jane Downs, C.B. Follett, and Susan Terris, Cloud View Poets: An Anthology - Master Classes With David St. John is an impressively diverse collection of 82 poets who each had in common that they studied poetry with David St. John (Professor and Chairman, the Creative Writing Department, University of Southern California) in one of eight weekend seminars he gives each year. Each poem in this anthology was written contemporaneously with the poet's enrollment in one of those seminars. The range, styles, subject matter, span the spectrum, but taken altogether provide an impressive (albeit collective) representation for the quality of those instructive seminars, the professor who taught them, and the students who enrolled in them. Why We're in Bakersfield: We're waiting for your voice to drop, for your 'nads to reach their apt angle.//True, the city is scruffy in spots,/but there are parks and trails and sushi bars/to complement the taquerias.//We're waiting for you to become interesting,/for your brain to blaze neon.//Meanwhile we bear the heat,/squeegee the dust from our windshield and/watch people wheel their babies through the mall.//Mornings we find ourselves downwind/of the ample valley--scent of barns and cow dung,//first light rising over the Tchachapis/from the Mojave beyond, sixteen-/wheelers headed our way.//We long for that light, and wait for you. -- Joel T. Katz