A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) (Paperback)

by Mary Kinzie (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Known for her poetry (Ghost Ship) and for cogent critical essays (The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose), Kinzie here joins the crowd of poets explaining poetry to beginners (see "notes" below)Aand distinguishes herself. Mixing her own theories in with more widely shared axioms, Kinzie manages to cover the basics while shedding new light on line break, syntax and sentence. "Understanding poems as both embedded in progression and indebted to surprise," Kinzie shows how features like rhyme work sometimes as foreground, sometimes as backgroundAphenomena she dubs "recession of technique." Anticipating the needs of students who will encounter her Guide as a textbook or reference work, Kinzie has wisely designed the book to be used alongside a comprehensive poetry anthology (and recommends several). Her quotes and references come mostly and unapologetically from a particular tradition that emphasizes form and control: Thomas Hardy, Louise Bogan, Edwin Muir and the remarkable Julia Randall turn up a lot, while Pound and Williams scarcely appear. Her Guide concludes with a set of provocative exercises, a glossary, and a very knowledgeable bibliography. But sophistication of argument, charming idiosyncrasies of taste, and a refusal to condescend are what really make Kinzie's book stand out.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Kinzie, a poet, critic, and director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University, knows her stuff. This is a sound reference book for any writer wishing to better understand the dynamics of poetry. The book is organized around six elements of style: line, syntax, diction, trope, rhetoric, and rhythm. While reasserting the claim of poetry as art, Kinzie balances the approaches (and risks) that tradition, technique, and meaning afford in the shaping of verse. Her organization asserts that the chief mechanism of thought is the sentence, and from its elegance bigger notions are built. Particularly strong is Kinzie's commitment to revealing the dynamics of how sounds and rhythms qualify thought units, vehicle qualifies tenor, and parallels continuously cooperate. While scholarly, this is also clear, unpedantic, and substantive. A good complement to the reliable verse handbooks of Louis Turco and Alfred Corn or Joseph Malof's Manual of English Meters (Greenwood, 1978).?Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 572 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226437396
• ISBN-13: 978-0226437392
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #66,310 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe the best book on prosody yet, February 1, 2000

By	Jeff Oaks (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews

I'm using Kinzie's book right now in a poetry class I teach. I think it's one of the few books to actually talk about the kinds of tensions that make poems work and not work. I'm especially impressed by her discussions of the way lines and sentences work with and at times against one another. I haven't read in any of the recent crop of books on prosody anything about the relationship of sentence to line, which makes Kinzie's work all the more exciting and original. And smart. I recommend this book to anyone who's really interested in the kinds of questions all poets must face. I wish someone would've given me this much information before I got to grad school. It's a terrific book, and not so hard to understand as the numbers of pages might suggest.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great guide for poets and fiction writers too, November 22, 2005

By	reader (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

A great poet and a great text.

Things that stand out for me: The first sentence of the book: "I believe poets read poetry differently than non-poets do." The book continues to seem like a brilliant reaction to a lack of good textbooks. And Kinzie addresses this: "First, the book should present the sounds and rhythms of poetry alongside consideration of the ideas and thought-units within the poems. It sounds simple enough, yet few introductions to formal poetry now treat sense and sound as parallels that continuously cooperate even when one seems dominant. And few of my recent predecessors give essential space to the chief mechanism of thought: the sentence, along with the other elements of grammatical construction." Kinzie repeatedly uses different takes on the same phrase: "...will help you teach yourself" In the section, Writing the Poem you Read: A View of the Artistic Process she says, "To become better acquainted with poetry you must read poems as if you were writing them. The reader follows...the many paths that were not taken by the author."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Workout, September 4, 2007

By	Laina McMillion "calliope" (Richmond, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's refreshing to find a book that changes perspectives, and that's what Kinzie's work does. You're made to really think and re-think styles and nuance that's often overlooked. The exercises are also useful!