Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry

Statman, Mark

ISBN 10: 0915924595 / ISBN 13: 9780915924592

Published by Teachers & Writers, 2000

About this Item

With a preface from Kenneth Koch, 171 pages, square in spine, no rips or tears, unmarked.

Seller Inventory # 7335

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry
• Publisher: Teachers & Writers
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0915924595
• ISBN 13: 9780915924592
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 11 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

In this book, poet and teacher Mark Statman not only presents practical ideas and assignments distilled from his many years of experience as a creative writing teacher, he also tells us how he develops such ideas and how other teachers--at any level--can too.

Reviews

In this general book, elementally concerned with writing--specifically poetry--in the classroom, Statman draws from his experience of teaching elementary students for Teachers & Writers Collaborative and undergraduates at Eugene Lang College. The offerings here are activities organized by subject: time, family, silence, loss, travel, dreams, and contemporary society. Statman calls his approach "process- and labor-intensive, and highly collaborative." Oddly, the activities aren't dynamic, specific, or incremental, though revision is included as one of them. Perhaps this randomness is owing to the activities set up here being ancillary to an established classroom curriculum. All the same, what is here is slight compared with Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot's non-poetry specific books Common Sense (Greenwood, 1985), for students, and Beat Not the Poor Desk (Greenwood, 1982), for teachers, which are superior maps to good writing, with increments easily adapted to include poetry.
-Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York
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