The Art of Poetry Writing: A Guide For Poets, Students, & Readers

Poet, novelist, scholar, translator, playwright, and teacher, William Packard has known every side of a writer's life. As founder and editor of The New York Quarterly, a national magazine devoted to the craft of poetry, he reads some 50,000 poems each year-most of them sadly deficient in sound, metrics, form, voice, and quality. This book is written to help poets address the central concerns of their craft and art.

Lively, inspiring, opinionated, and sometimes curmudgeonly, The Art of Poetry Writing covers a broad range of topics, both technical and personal, that all poets need to consider:

-Poetic devices and diction
-Verse forms and free verse
-Rhyme and metrics
-Creative vision and revision
-The benefits and problems of workshops and writing classes
-30 writing challenges to develop form and style and technique
-When to seek publication-and when not to
-What to read while writing
-The life of the poet, including keeping a journal, giving readings, applying for grants, and more.

Remarks by and excerpts from the work of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, Stevens, Moore, Thomas, Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, Dickey, Bukowski, Ashbery, and dozens of other poets make this an essential companion for students, teachers and anyone who writes or reads poetry.

William Packard is the author of The Poet's Dictionary, an A-Z reference of poetic devices, and The Poet's Craft, a collection of interviews with poets originally published in The New York Quarterly. He has been a professor of poetry at New York University for over twenty-five years, working with thousands of students; in his work with The New York Quarterly he has interviewed hundreds of practicing poets on the issues discussed in this book. He lives in New York City.