Customer Reviews

Writing Poetry

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

 

 

This book is well done with many writing ideas to keep you generating poems for the rest of your life. The discussions of the sample poems are excellent and clear. Another good book to add to my stash of books for teaching writing classes.

~Joan Mazza, author of six books including DREAMING YOUR REAL SELF.

A community college class in creative writing had an earlier version of this as required text. Feeling I was only a fiction writer, I came to the poetry half of the class and to this book with an open mind, read it, absorbed it, did the exercises as instructed. Two of my first three poems sold to decent literary magazines, and I've gone on to publish more than 50 more, though I still don't consider myself primarily a poet. She made me the poet I am today, and I thank her for it.

The trick for the student is to come to learning with that open mind, say "teach me," not, "oh, but rap lyrics (or whatever) are the thing, and I won't do this at all." No matter what you're eventually going to write, the basic ideas in here regarding images, language, etc. will make you a better writer. I think Drake's tone makes that more possible.

I am currently using this book as a textbook for a poetry class, and I am very satisfied with it. It utilizes plenty of examples to illustrate the concepts in the book, and has dozens of ideas for getting started writing poetry.

I have used Barbara Drake's Writing Poetry with my writing classes. Many of my students keep and reuse their copies for years. Drake knows how to encourage imagination, imagery and layered depth in a poet's thoughts on what it means to be alive.

This forty-seven dollar paperback is an adequate introduction into poetry writing. In fact, it's quite compreensive in its approach.

But it won't make you a good poet. You need other things, like a dictionary, a dictionary of synonyms, a brain, and a heart. Now to get all of these things after paying $47 for a paperback is tough. A good dictionary is tough to find these days. So is a good brain, and even harder to find after you got the brain is the heart. Who has all five things?

I'm holding the book in my hand and it seems small. It's helped my poetry skills (but, of course, I'm only writing for myself) but, I don't think it was worth the whole $47. Maybe $20. But it's worth having.

This book came in great condition in awesome amount of time. I am in college and I was worried the book would come after all of my work started to accumulate. But it came in a great amount of time for me to get my work started.

This book is full of examples and ideas to jumpstart a struggling writer into many rich hours of poetic bliss.