Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry

Poetry. Writing Reference. WINGBEATS II: EXERCISES & PRACTICE IN POETRY, the eagerly awaited follow-up to the original WINGBEATS, is an exciting collection from teaching poets—58 poets, 59 exercises. Whether you want a quick exercise to jump-start the words or multi-layered approaches that will take you deeper into poetry, WINGBEATS II is for you. The exercises include clear step-by-step instruction and numerous example poems, including work by Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Cleopatra Mathis, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Patricia Smith, William Carlos Williams, and others. You will find exercises for collaborative writing, for bending narrative into new poetic shapes, for experimenting with persona, for writing nonlinear poems. For those interested in traditional elements, WINGBEATS II includes exercises on the sonnet, as well as approaches to meter, line breaks, syllabics, and more. Like its predecessor, WINGBEATS II will be a standard in creative writing classes, a standard go-to in every poet's library.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of two books of poetry, Presence and Vegetables and Other Relationships, and co-editor of several volumes, including WINGBEATS: EXERCISES & PRACTICE IN POETRY (2011) and WINGBEATS II (2014), and LIFTING THE SKY: SOUTHWESTERN HAIKU & HAIGA, both from Dos Gatos Press. His poems have recently appeared in the anthologies THIS ASSIGNMENT IS SO GAY; The Crafty Poet; Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer's; and Between: New Gay Poetry. Wiggerman's sonnets have twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He is chief editor for Dos Gatos Press in Austin, Texas, publisher of the Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its seventeenth year.



David Meischen has been writing poetry and teaching the writing of poetry for thirty years. He has had poems in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and other journals, as well as Two Southwests (Virtual Artists Collective, 2008), which features poets from the Southwest of China and the United States. Meischen has participated in four collaborative poetry and art shows, most recently Ekphrasis: Sacred Stories of the Southwest (Phoenix, AZ, Obliq Art, 2014). Also a fiction writer, Meischen has recent stories in The Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2012 Talking Writing Prize for Short Fiction. Co-founder of Dos Gatos Press and co-editor of WINGBEATS I and II, Meischen lives in Austin, TX, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co- editor—Scott Wiggerman.