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The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach

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When I bought this book, I envisioned it being like Kowit's "In the Palm of Your Hand" or Addonizio and Laux's "Poet's Companion". It isn't.

Instead of the comfortable, conversational and pretty easy-going tone and pace of the other two books, this is a densely packed collection of exercises from a great many different poets. Each exercise is set out, and then expanded on in a very useful essay/note/commentary from the poet who contributed the exercise. In some ways, it is this latter feature that is the most useful. Quite often you will come across a poetry (or any other) exercise, where it is quite clear what you are meant to do, but with no clue about what it is that you are trying to achieve. Here, each exercise has an accompanying explanation. Problem solved.

Because the exercises are contributed by so many different poets, it is unavoidable that there will be some exercises which seem pointless or stupid or irrelevant. This is where the explanation part comes in handy once again. Don't like the way the exercise is structured? Read on, find out what it is that you are supposed to be doing, and redraft the exercise to suit your own personal needs/tastes.

Overall, this is a very useful little book. My copy is only one year old, but is seriously dog-eared and full of strips of paper serving as bookmarks. With the number of different poets/attitudes/approaches included, there are bound to be sections that you read with a sense of either boredom or incredulity. Never mind - there are plenty more sections that will have you scrabbling for pen and paper.

Maybe the best way of using the book is to think of it like a well-stocked pantry cupboard - browse, take what you need today, leave the rest for dinner tomorrow, or boil leftovers down for soup ...

As a teacher of poetry writing, I am always looking for books that include exercises and inspiring starters that will help the young and or inexperienced writer. I bought this book for that purpose, but what I found myself doing was bringing the book home week after week so that I could experience the activities personally.

Writing is an incredibly personal activity that isolates one from others. This book brings writers together collectively to that lone writer and helps her to know she is not alone, and it helps that writer to try some new ways of tapping that well of creativity...even when the supply is running low.

There are a lot of books out there on writing poetry, but few are as inspiring and helpful as Ms. Behn's. It is a must have for every poet, teacher, and lover of poetry.

This book is a must-read for any poet, regardless of skill. It has exercises ranging from terribly technical to wildly free formed. They are fun, sometimes even silly, and lead the reader into mental places they might never have thought to go. The results of the exercises always suprise the reader, and I would say that if a poem doesn't suprise it's writer, nothing has been learned. I recommended this book to a freshman poetry class and they all did many, many exercises on their own time. (Not a small feat for time-pressed college students!) Overall, I rank this book right up there with other indispensible books for poets such as Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg and Letters to a Young Poet from Rilke. Read this book, but don't just read it--live in it, sip from it, allow it to lead you where you may not know you need to go. You will be better for it, both in your writing and in your spirit.

I discovered this book during my MA program a few years back. At the time, I'd not seen anything quite like it, aside from Lew Turco's Book of Forms, a book that I enjoyed. But since I'm not a primarily formalist poet, I found Turco's book somewhat wanting.

Robin Behn and Chase Twichell's *The Practice of Poetry* provided a needed alternative. It's filled with great generative poetry writing exercises, each accompanied by a short discussion written by the poet/professor who contributed the piece. These introductions are at least as valuable as the assignments themselves: reading them, one sees a poet's mind in action, something very hard to describe or capture.

The most useful of these assignments gets you writing very quickly. David St. John's contribution, a dramatic monologue, for example, urges writers to find a famous person from history or literature and write from that person's perspective. I'll never forget a shy young student writing a monologue in Sherlock Holmes' voice in my workshop.

Other assignments do come off as flaky, and yet the contributors admit as such. One exercise leads poets through a chanting exercise that seems so odd that I'd fear for my job if I tried it in class. Even in a less formal workshop, I'd be reticent about chanting. Of course, if chanting is something you enjoy . . .

The book concludes with two or three essays about revision that every poet needs to read. Beginning poets especially can benefit the wisdom herein.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is it variety. The book includes assignments from all ends of the aesthetic spectrum--from Jackson Mac Low to Dana Gioia. So, whether you're a New Formalist, a Neo-Surrealist, or a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E disciple, this book will prove indispensable to your library.

As a poet and teacher of poetry for decades, I periodically experiment with different, newer texts for my poetry workshops (graduate and undergraduate) at Towson University. But nothing comes close to this book. It's wonderful--both for class use and for jumpstarting myself out of one plateau onto the next.

This is a wide ranging collection of poetry exercises written by poets who also teach. With over 90 exercises (most no more than two pages long), you'll find they are various in "approach, style, and content, and cover a great deal of territory"(excerpted from the intro.). For that reason, some of the exercises can come across irrelevant, as another reviewer mentioned, or juvenile (ie: "auctioning" off your line to another student in class). However, keep in mind that these exercises can be re-drafted or custom-built to the needs of the class. Additionally, the narratives that follow each exercise are a fantastic way to learn about the exercise from the teacher's perspective: what works, what doesn't, what kind of students have difficulty with the exercise, etc. Unlike most exercise books that just spit out what to do, the teacher expands on why this particular exercise is a useful one for the student and what the exercise may help the student create.

My only gripe is I would have liked to have an appendix containing some of the poems that the exercises reference. This would be useful in seeing what the exercise strives to create or attain. That minor complaint aside, I find this to be a resourceful book for poets of all levels - give these a try and see what happens!

I found this book more difficult to follow in my attempt to do creative writing on my own. I felt it lacked enough example poems. The exercises were inconsistent, as they seemed to come from some very different teaching styles. Many of the exercises just seemed so goofy that I didn't even bother with them. I would much more strongly recommend "In the Palm of Your Hand" for the same purpose.

I teach an 8th grade Language Arts Class in rural Washington State. I found our textbook to be bland and typical. I was looking for some work for my students to actually learn how to write poetry correctly. This book does this.

The Practice of Poetry is a book that you (sometimes as an individual, sometimes in a group) do, more than a book you read. It doesn't have a lot of data on the technical aspects of poetry (rhyme, meter, style, etc.) It also doesn't address the various schools and movements of poetry. It has a lot of exercises on various aspects of poetry (mining the unconscious, writing in images and metaphors, what voice is being used, the use/misuse of strangeness, poetic structure, the poetry/music connection, and rewriting).

I would have liked to see some of the poetry of the contributors to see if I wanted to investigate them further. There is plenty of empty space where that could be done.

As this book was published in 1992, the comment by contributor Agha Shahid Ali that ghazals are an unfamiliar form in American poetry is no longer true, as Robert Bly used them in his books "The Night Abraham Called To The Stars" and "My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy." Many of the poems referenced are now available on the internet, so the references as to where to obtain the poems mentioned in the book, and the poems of the contributors, are dated. It would be great if there was a new edition of this book.

But the exercises are time-independent, and if you do them, your poetry will most likely improve.

They tunnel into the imagination, from dark places to inner and outer journeys. They include exercises for several poetic forms I hadn't discovered. The group exercises, with a little finagling, can be used for lone desperado writers. I'm definitely hooked.