Annie Finch
poet, writer, performer
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A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry

A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry by Annie Finch book cover

“Nothing less than an MFA program in 700 pages,” writes G.M.. Palmer in The Critical Flame.

Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publish Date: February 8, 2012
Pages: 731
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0472033645

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A Poet’s Craft is a wonderful and necessary book.

Honoree Fannon Jeffers, Poet and Professor, Graduate Creative Writing Faculty, University of Oklahoma

 

From The Publisher

This unique, accessible, and delightful book is jam-packed with everything you need to know to excel at the craft of the poet, whether you are an accomplished poet or a student, part of a group of writers or on your own. A Poet’s Craft combines the best of a forms handbook, a comprehensive poetry anthology, and a complete poetry-writing textbook, all in a style readable and lively enough for readers from advanced high-school to adult to enjoy. APC includes sections on journaling and inspiration, revision, publishing, and even how to assemble a collection, along with poetry-writing exercises and discussion of classic and contemporary poems. It is logically organized to provide a complete overview of the elements of poetry writing, from diction to trope to free verse. Written by a top expert in the field of versification, A Poet’s Craft also provides a complete introduction to meter and to writing formal poetry, covering important new ground not covered by other form guides.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.

Excerpt

This book distills into a few hundred pages a lifetime of hearing, memorizing, reciting, reading, imagining, conceiving, scribbling, dictating, dreaming in, writing, typing, word-processing, revising, proofreading, publishing, perusing, discussing, parsing, analyzing, criticizing, scanning, editing, teaching, reviewing, translating, and loving poetry.

As a general guide to writing poetry that also includes a discussion of writing in form so thorough that it would otherwise be available only in a separate book, A Poet’s Craft aims to combine the best of all other poetry-writing guides in one volume. Like poetry textbooks, it includes poetry-writing exercises, discusses classic and contemporary poems as examples, and provides a complete overview of the elements of poetry. Like creative writing guides, it aims for a lively and mature tone suitable for independent and adult students as well as undergraduates and graduates, and includes such sections as journaling and inspiration, revision, publishing, and how to put together a book. However, A Poet’s Craft also offers a thorough and detailed discussion of what is commonly acknowledged to be the most difficult aspect of poetry to teach and learn–writing in meter and form–and, more than most existing form guides, takes a stimulating and culturally inclusive view of formal poetics, from sonnets and sapphics, epics and dactyls to rap, blue, pantoums, and avant-garde procedural techniques (for those interested only in building their knowledge of poetic form, this section of the book is also published separately, under the title A Poet’s Ear) . . .

A Poet’s Craft  was written to help you steer a way between the two extremes of poetry as mere self-expression and poetry as holy writ, to help demystify some of the unique skills and techniques by which poetry works is glamorous, grammarish magic. This book is for everyone who wants to become skilled enough in the art of poetry that you can reach the place where writing allows the poet and the poem simply to be. That is the goal of the ancient alchemy of this unique art.

Reviews

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

A Poet’s Craft is instructing, absorbing, entertaining, fascinating—and the sections on meter are both soothing and enlightening. . . Annie Finch is one of those few writers who can share their own joys while teaching.

Temperance Davis, Poet

 

 

 

Nothing less than an MFA program in 600 pages

G.M. Palmer, The Critical Flame