Customer Reviews

Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry

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

 

 

This textbook could be used by college creative writing students just beginning the study of writing poetry as well as advanced students, honing voice, craft, and expressive forms of poetry. Wendy Bishop writes a friendly, well-organized textbook that makes learning sophisticated poetic techniques enjoyable. This trade paperback is a fairly big book 9.09 x 6.28 x 0.83, with 437 pages, presenting a wealth of material in an interesting and accessible manner. Chapters are organized by "forms," broadly conceived as patterns of sound, rhythm, and meaning. Such forms include free verse, metered lines, rhymed and unrhymed couplets, elegies and aubades, ghazals and pantoums, haiku and haiku-like sequences, listing and repetitions, odes and praise songs, prose poems, quatrains, sestinas, sonnets, tercets, terza rima, triplets, and villanelles. Each chapter begins with a clear discussion of professional examples of the form. Next model poems are considered to move from "Reading into Writing." Then an extensive and expansive series of "Invention Exercises" appear, containing drafts of poems by students based on the exercises with additional professional examples. I give my highest recommendation to this text for students of poetry.

This is an excellent idea book for the writer who is having difficulty with productivity or inspiration. The different ways to inspire yourself or find a poem will have you writing. An excellent resource book for the writing class. I refer to it for unique or novel ways of looking at the world.

This book is a must for anyone interested in poetry, and in particular for anyone who thinks that formal poetry is old-fashioned, reactionary, and uninteresting. The chapters allow you to read, write and think about the poetic forms and issues under discussion. The exercises are wonderful and the explanatory prose lovely and intelligent.

I have taught creative writing for more than 20 years at the university level and for all I know, Bishop has written a helpful book. But a writing text book that costs $77.00 is simply outrageous. I wouldn't buy this for my own use nor would I assign it to students.