|
Some of the exercises stimulate the muse, while others are a bit brief.The index at the back should have covered topics and concepts.
These took quite a bit of time, but resulted in some good poems. These exercises are quite involved. I was hoping for some exercises for writing poetry in the high school classroom.
Good to have as a reference tool. Very detailed, a little too structured for my taste. I would however, reccommend it to more disciplined poets or writers.
It would be great if there was a new edition of this book. I would have liked to see some of the poetry of the contributors to see if I wanted to investigate them further. There is plenty of empty space where that could be done.As this book was published in 1992, the comment by contributor Agha Shahid Ali that ghazals are an unfamiliar form in American poetry is no longer true, as Robert Bly used them in his books "The Night Abraham Called To The Stars" and "My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy." Many of the poems referenced are now available on the internet, so the references as to where to obtain the poems mentioned in the book, and the poems of the contributors, are dated. The Practice of Poetry is a book that you (sometimes as an individual, sometimes in a group) do, more than a book you read. But the exercises are time-independent, and if you do them, your poetry will most likely improve. It also doesn't address the various schools and movements of poetry. It doesn't have a lot of data on the technical aspects of poetry (rhyme, meter, style, etc). It has a lot of exercises on various aspects of poetry (mining the unconscious, writing in images and metaphors, what voice is being used, the use/misuse of strangeness, poetic structure, the poetry/music connection, and rewriting).
But since I'm not a primarily formalist poet, I found Turco's book somewhat wanting.Robin Behn and Chase Twichell's *The Practice of Poetry* provided a needed alternative. One exercise leads poets through a chanting exercise that seems so odd that I'd fear for my job if I tried it in class. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is it variety. I discovered this book during my MA program a few years back. The book includes assignments from all ends of the aesthetic spectrum--from Jackson Mac Low to Dana Gioia. Other assignments do come off as flaky, and yet the contributors admit as such. So, whether you're a New Formalist, a Neo-Surrealist, or a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E disciple, this book will prove indispensable to your library.
These introductions are at least as valuable as the assignments themselves: reading them, one sees a poet's mind in action, something very hard to describe or capture.The most useful of these assignments gets you writing very quickly. Beginning poets especially can benefit the wisdom herein. The book concludes with two or three essays about revision that every poet needs to read. David St. Of course, if chanting is something you enjoy.
At the time, I'd not seen anything quite like it, aside from Lew Turco's Book of Forms, a book that I enjoyed. Even in a less formal workshop, I'd be reticent about chanting. I'll never forget a shy young student writing a monologue in Sherlock Holmes' voice in my workshop. It's filled with great generative poetry writing exercises, each accompanied by a short discussion written by the poet/professor who contributed the piece. John's contribution, a dramatic monologue, for example, urges writers to find a famous person from history or literature and write from that person's perspective.
|
