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

Kinzie, Mary

ISBN 10: 0226437396 / ISBN 13: 9780226437392

Published by University of Chicago Press (edition First Edition), 1999

About this Item

The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way.

Seller Inventory # 0226437396-7-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226437396
• ISBN 13: 9780226437392
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fair

About this title

Synopsis

A Poet's Guide to Poetry brings Mary Kinzie's 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 shares her own successful classroom tactics—encouraging 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 devious.

Part I presents the style, grammar, and rhetoric of poems with a wealth of examples from various literary periods.

Part II discusses the way the elements of a poem are controlled in time through a careful explanation and exploration of meter and rhythm. The "four freedoms" of free verse are also examined.

Part III closes the book with helpful practicum chapters on writing in form. Included here are writing exercises for beginning as well as advanced writers, a dictionary of poetic terms replete with poetry examples, and an annotated bibliography for further explanatory reading.

This useful handbook is an ideal reference for literature and writing students as well as practicing poets.

About the Author

Mary Kinzieis 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.