Customer Reviews

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is a must for anyone who loves formal poetry (sonnets, villanelles, pantoums e.t.c.). After decades of so called "free verse" the formal poem is making a come back. This book explains each form in detail, provides the history of the form and many of the best examples. A "close up" on each form tells about an individual poet who uses that form. It would make a perfect text for a course on formal poetry. In fact, the teacher that recommended it to me uses it in her college courses.

There are many books about "what poetry is," especially in this time when Contemporary American poetry has taken off. This one is one of the best and should be included in all poetry collections. This book is the only one I have found that shows the poetic forms and their contemporary contexts (after all, free verse borrows from the forms). This book also joins the Contemporary and Modern poets with the Romantics, Classical, et al. Both Strand's and Boland's essays and views should be embraced for their insight and knowledge--did the negative reviewers actually read this book? The Making of a Poem is a treasure that acknowledges and celebrates poetry, moving past what the title implies.

This book provides a good introduction to poetic forms such as the villanelle, sestina, or sonnet. Included is a description of the exact topology of the form, a history of the form, and the contemporary use of the form. The first or second poem under each chapter, usually follows the classic model of the form, and allowed me to understand the mechanics. The anthology of poems chronologically ranged from the classic (and who would dare discuss sonnets without including one from Shakespeare), to more modern poets as Gwendolyn Brooks. In most of the verse forms, there is a close-up view of one of the poets selected in that section, but for some reason that good idea was discontinued when discussing "shaping forms" (elegy, pastoral, and ode). The chapter on Meter is only two pages long, so it is disappointing that at least some examples weren't included here. The final section of "Open Forms" perhaps allows one to reach their own conclusions about the use of form, and what constitutes memorable poetry. No matter what, an appreciation of form should help your appreciation of poetry. I would have also appreciated a little more in depth analysis of a few of the poems to show how the form was used to convey the poet's message.

This book gives a brief history of a form, information on its construction, and follows these with examples of the form in use. The examples begin with older, classic poems in the form and are followed by more modern adaptations.

I have found more modern examples lacking in many of the books I have read on form. Seeing more recent examples helps illustrate the usefulness of form to the modern writer. It could also be extremely helpful to writers in adapting traditional forms to their own work.

The descriptions of the forms are terse, but quite adequate, assuming the reader already knows what an iamb is. The examples are well-chosen and varied. It gives a good basic understanding of the forms it discusses and would be a wonderful starting point for writing formed verse.

This book is about writing poetry. It is not about the content of a poem, it is about the formal structure. The authors compile descriptions of seven poetic forms (eight, if you count stanza as a form, as the authors inexplicably do) and three thematic categories. Following each description is a long list of examples of the forms, from the point when each form entered English up to... well, up to...

And that's where we run into the first problem with this book. There are good poets out there writing sonnets and sestinas today, but if the authors are to be believed, formal poetry came to a juddering halt when Robert Frost died. As a reader of poetry, I like Dylan Thomas, Robert Browning, and William Shakespeare, but if a student learning poetry uses this book as the yardstick of where these forms are right now, that student will at best be over forty years out of date.

That's not to suggest that the selections of poems in this book aren't good. They are. Not only do the compilers select the best poets of days gone by, but they select the best examples of the work of those poets. But the selection is slanted in favor of the past. To be really useful a book needs to include both a historical overview of a form and a synoptic look at where poetry lives right now.

Likewise, the selection of forms is brief. I like villanelles and ballads as much as the next guy, but would it really break the editors to dedicate a little more space to ghazals, cinquains, triolets, and haiku? The selection of forms in this book is very introductory, limited to the forms the editors could find in English in profusion. Perhaps somebody fairly new to poetry, who hasn't learned what the forms are and how they work, will find this collection useful. But a poet eager to make the leap beyond mere beginner status will be frustrated with this book.

This book isn't bad. What it does focus on, it focuses on in depth and fairly globally (as much as limiting the selection to English can be global). For beginners, this book may well be a handy introduction to versification. But for those who have been writing for a while, and those who want to move beyond the beginning, there are better books available. Consider, for instance, Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms or Barbara Drake's Writing Poetry. Take your time to comparison-shop, ask more experienced poets, and just read. Because you will find books that suit your needs far better than this one.

This was a good introduction to poetic forms, giving clear definitions of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, etc. As a matter of personal choice, I found some of the poems not particularly apt for the poetic form they were trying to define: why was Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in the "Pastoral" chapter and not the "Ode" chapter? The editors seemed to make arbitrary choices that were sometimes off-kilter. Otherwise, the selection of poems was quite good. As for the complaints about Eurocentrism...let's be honest if not politically correct: nearly all poetic forms in classical poetry were created by Eurocentrist poets. And this book is about classical forms of poetry and how contemporary and modern poets adapted to those forms.

Being fairly new to poetry, I purchased this book as an introduction to poetic forms, and it does not disappoint. The authors have cultivated a fantastic guide to many of the more popular forms of the modern era, and a few less popular forms. I found the chapters on the Villanelle and on Blank Verse to alone be worth the minimal price tag. The descriptions are terse but wholly concise. The choices the authors made for examples are so perfect that this book could work simply as an anthology of great poems. It is not, though, an all-around introduction to poetry, meter is barely touched upon, and some lesser forms are not given mention, but as books on important poetic forms go, I could hardly recommend another.

While objections might be appropriate for high-end poets and advanced university students, I have found this book quite helpful at an introductory high school level. It is short and to the point, and does not overly discourage a young student trying to become acquainted with traditional poetic forms.

The Making of a Poem is a good book to read for people introducing themselves to poetry and also for writers who wish to learn more about different ways they can work with rhyme, meter, and poetic context and expectation.

The introductions that precede each type of form (from sonnet to pantoum to sestina) could have been fleshed out more, and it would have been great if Strand and Boland had taken one or two poems from each section and presented them with commentary, pointing out the various elements and the ways in which the poet adhered to or twisted the poetic rules for various effects. However, because the intros to each poetic section include a brief historical background as well as a brief overview of how the form is used by today's poets, we still get a good general idea of how these various forms evolved.

Also, I loved that the sample poems presented for each form spanned from early poetry to contemporary poems - it was always interesting to see the progression and the contrasts. And even if you don't learn as much as you want to about each form, the book manages to serve well as an anthology of fine poetry, surprising you on each page with another gem (some familiar, like a Shakespeare sonnet, and others more obscure but still incredibly riveting).

Have you ever wondered how poets organized their poems? If studying form makes a poem easier to understand, then this anthology is definitely for you. In college, I remember my English professors arguing that ideas are more substantive than the format, which, when one deconstructs the literary artifact, is ultimately correct. However, what I soon discovered for many of my beginning high school and college students was that their sole focus on content often discouraged the novice since he needed explicit examples of how past poets constructed their works.

I hear some people exclaiming that copying another poet's style likely will not get you published. Absolutely. You are one hundred percent correct. However, with so few Americans invested in poetry these days, we need to reexamine how we teach creative writing so that we can at least entice them into producing the written word that can stand as a living testament for the rest of their lives. Just telling the concrete-sequential or analytical thinker to just brainstorm ideas for a poem is likely doomed to fail. We can do better, and, with the format of this book, this is a real possibility.

The format of the book is broken down into common poetic forms such as the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, the Stanza, the Elegy, the Pastoral, the Ode, and open forms such as Free Verse. For the experienced bard, I agree that the selection is limiting; you will not find any advanced contemporary poetic strategies to whet your appetite. However, Editors and Poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland recognize their intended audience, and thus produce a format commiserate for them. Each poetic form begins with a breakdown of the essential characteristics, followed by the history of the form, and then finishes with its use by contemporary poets. What follows are poems that clearly showcase the ingredients of the genre, but, more importantly, how poets manipulated the genre to help engender a specific idea.

How did the anthology work in my classrooms? Very well, especially among my math and science students, whose antipathy for poetry was only matched by their dread of writing something that was "creative." Did any of the poems rival what I could find on the Poetry Foundation or Poets.Org websites? No. But I was genuinely satisfied to see that they had a way in to the world of the written word and that, most importantly, they felt invigorated enough to revise and to share what they had done not only with their peers but also with their family and loved ones.

Why the four out of the five stars? I think the one thing they forgot was the student who bleeds creativity. My artistic students commented that the anthology, strangely enough, was too clear for them, demotivating them because they were riding on familiar ground. Of course, I differentiated for them, but it would have been helpful if Strand and Boland would have added a section exclusively for the advanced writer, who, understandably, is interested in what the current poetic crowd is up to. If they were to add that to their next edition, then I think they will have a text that will give everyone something to shoot for. However, the size and appearance of the text is appealing, so I would not recommend expanding it to the size of poetry anthologies found in upper level English classrooms.