Poetry: Tools & Techniques: A Practical Guide to Writing Engaging Poetry

Want to improve your craft? Then this is a good place to start. Poems do not simply happen, they are made – Poetry: Tools & Techniques shows how to make them. In plain, straight-forward language, this practical guide introduces the devices and techniques used by successful poets. Poetry: Tools & Techniques is a starting point for writers to find their own direction rather than a definitive textbook on how to write in the proper and approved manner. Poetry: Tools & Techniques investigates the structure of language and how it conveys meaning – and from that shows how to create and use a poetic, a philosophy of language, to shape and inform your writing. The book encourages poets to explore the limits of language and discover how to make language speak beyond itself – to make language say what it was not designed to say, to express the inexpressible. Poetry: Tools & Techniques provides an introduction to the basic elements of poetry – metaphor, imagery, punctuation, syntax, rhythm, etc. – the actual techniques and devices that go into making a poem, right down to the nuts and bolts structural parts of language – the conjunctions, prepositions, articles, etc. – and shows how they affect poetic language. Whether you are a beginning poet or an experienced writer, Poetry: Tools & Techniques will help you improve your craft.

John C. Goodman is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the past editor of ditch, (www.ditchpoetry.com), an online magazine of experimental poetry. He has published four collections of poetry: naked beauty (Blue & Yellow Dog Press), The Shepherd's Elegy (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), Dark Age (Grey Borders) and Twenty Moments that Changed the World (Locofo/Moria Poetry), as well as a novella, The Duck Lake Chronicles (Quattro Books) and a novel, Talking to Wendigo (Turnstone Press) which was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award. He currently lives in British Columbia, Canada.