Customer Reviews

The Mind's Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry

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University academician Kevin Clark holds a Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as a widely published poet. In "The Mind's Eye: A Guide To Writing Poetry", he brings to bear his many years of experience and expertise to provide aspiring poets with a clear, instructive, and occasionally inspiring 'how to' manual and guide to writing clear, engaging poetry. All the elements of poetic expression are covered including imagery, sound, implication, conflict, transformation, lyricism, structure, portraiture, narrative, traditional forms, sequencing, and revision. Featuring more than one hundred skill building exercises in writing poetry, eighty model poems by diverse contemporary poets, a concise summary of at the end of each chapter distilling its main concepts, as well as suggestions for forming poetry-writing groups, arranging poetry readers, and even how to publish poems, "The Mind's Eye" is an ideal instruction manual and guide that will prove invaluable for aspiring poets whether writing for simple self-expression or who have ambitions to being published.

As a founder of the Poetry Editing Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, I have found this to be one of the clearest and best texts on writing poetry available, especially for beginners. Another two books that reach this level of recommendation are Kowit's "In the Palm of the Hand," and surprisingly, Elizabeth's "Painless Poetry." This later work was a real surprise - it is written for early high school, but contains more technical matter than many equivalent college texts on writing poetry. Although the style of each of these texts is different - The Mind's eye is clearly college academic (but the best of the best at this), In the Palm of the Hand is adult workshop oriented, and Painless Poetry is high school academic -- all are worthy of reading early in the course of learning to write poems.

I bought "The Mind's Eye" for a poetry writing class. This is one of the few books that I purchased for a class and read with pleasure. From the first page, I hit the ground running, because this text didn't take me down blind-alleys or lead me into long-winded prose concerning the author's feelings on poetry. I learned meter, form, style, and more. When the course concluded, my poetry writing had improved as evidenced by my classmates critiques.

Useful book for beginning or emerging poets. Kevin Clark takes the beginning poet through tasks that help expand the imagination with comparison poems written by reknowned poets that exemplify the ethos of modern poetry. Good for any college or high school class. Definitely recommend. Being used in poetry class at UCLA extension.

Designed as almost a textbook that could be used in a course on writing poetry, this author offers a serious guide that is logical, well organized, rich with examples by poets you want to learn more about, and, for me, a source that provides immediate stimulus for active writing--in short, everything I hoped it would have and do.