Description

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A Poet's Craft transcends the limitations of current books, combining the best of three types of poetry-writing guides: textbooks for academic use, general guides to writing poetry, and guides to writing in form. Like textbooks, it includes poetry-writing exercises and discussion of classic and contemporary poems as examples, and is logically organized to provide a complete overview of the elements of poetry writing, from diction to trope to free verse. Like general poetry guides, it has a tone lively and mature enough for the nonundergraduate, and includes sections on journaling and inspiration, revision, publishing, and even how to assemble a poetry book. Like form guides, A Poet's Craft provides an introduction to meter and to writing formal poetry. Finch's book goes further than any poetry-writing guide now available to give readers a thorough, eclectic, and exciting introduction to every aspect of the art of poetry.

About the Author

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Annie Finch, poet, editor, and critic, has published twenty books of poetry and poetics including Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self,  An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry, and The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse.  Based in New York, Dr. Finch travels widely to teach and perform her poetry and is the founder of PoetryWitchCommunity.org, where she teaches poetry, meter, and more. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.

Praise For…

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"Finch’s book goes further than any poetry-writing guide now available to give readers a thorough and exciting introduction to every aspect of the art of poetry."— University of Michigan Press

"A Poet’s Craft is a wonderful and necessary book."
—Honoree Fannon Jeffers, Poet and Professor, Graduate Creative Writing Faculty, University of Oklahoma

"Personal, erudite, and comprehensive, this volume is really many books in one, the product of many years’ work and a lifetime of serious engagement with poetry. Sharing…writing exercises, study questions, discussions of poems for literary insight and excellence–the book presents detailed analyses of everything from metaphor to meter, from rhyme to revision."
— B. Wallenstein, CUNY City College, Review in Choice

"No question. Just a 6 am thank you from California. I'm reading A Poet's Craft. Instructing, absorbing, entertaining, fascinating. And now in the chapter on iambic meter--may I add "soothing and enlightening."I'm a late-comer to prosody and poetry studies, and relatively new to hearing the songs in iambic pentameter. I love reading about such rhythms and fluxes, but you are one if those few writers who can share their own joys while teaching. Again, thank you for early morning comforts."
—Temperance Davis, Reader

"A Poet’s Craft is a delightful read, a very useful textbook, and a treasure box of poems and poets, both familiar and un-. I carry it around with me everywhere so I can take little nibbles out of it every chance I get."
—Sarah Shmitt, English Teacher, Portland High School, Maine

"Quite simply the best book I know about making, writing, shaping & sharing poetry."
—Peter Meinke, poet, MFA faculty, University of Tampa

"This was the first poetry textbook that clicked with everyone in my class of nontraditional students. Whether “left-brained” retired nurses or “right-brained” visual artists, every one of them can understand it. Furthermore, they rave about how much they are learning from the text, while enjoying Finch’s tone."
—Ivy Page, poet

"A Poet’s Craft is an MFA program for the autodidact. . . it sounds the way Annie speaks, and it teaches poetry students to learn by reading closely…without exhortations, just gently slipping into examples and asking the right questions."
—Ann Michaels, Canadian Poet and Novelist

"Nothing less than an MFA program in 600 pages."
-G.M. Palmer, The Critical Flame