A Poet's Guide to Poetry, Second Edition (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Kinzie, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226923061 ISBN 13: 9780226923062

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

In A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie brings her decades of expertise as poet, critic, and director of the creative writing program at Northwestern University to bear in a comprehensive reference work for any writer wishing to better understand poetry. Detailing the formal concepts of poetry and methods of poetic analysis, she shows how the craft of writing can guide the art of reading poems. Using examples from the major traditions of lyric and meditative poetry in English from the medieval period to the present, Kinzie considers the sounds and rhythms of poetry along with the ideas and thought-units within poems. Kinzie also shares her own successful classroom tactics that encourage readers to approach a poem as if it were provisional.

The three parts of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry lead the reader through a carefully planned introduction to the ways we understand poetry. The first section provides careful, step-by-step instruction to familiarize students with the formal elements of poems, from the most obvious feature through the most subtle. The second part carefully examines meter and rhythm, as well as providing a theoretical and practical overview of free verse. The final section offers helpful chapters on writing in form. Rounding out the volume are writing exercises for beginning and advanced writers, a dictionary of poetic terms, and a bibliography of further reading.

For this new edition, Kinzie has carefully reworked the introductory material and first chapter, as well as amended the annotated bibliography to include the most recent works of criticism. The updated guide also contains revised exercises and adjustments throughout the text to make the work as lucid and accessible as possible.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Kinzie is a poet and critic.  She is professor of English and director of creative writing at Northwestern University, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.  She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Poetry Award.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0226923061
• ISBN 13: 9780226923062
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 584