Poetry: A Writers' Guide & Anthology
Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology is a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. The authors map out more than 25 key elements of poetry including image, lyric, point of view, metaphor, and movement and use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts. The book guides the reader through a range of poetic modes, including elegy, found poems, nocturne, ode, protest poems, ars poetica, lyric, narrative, and more.
Poetry also offers inspiring examples of contemporary poetry covering all the modes and elements discussed by the book, including poems by: Oliver de la Paz, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Natalie Diaz, Traci Brimhall, Terrance Hayes, Richard Blanco, Danez Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Mark Halliday, Eileen Myles, Mary Jo Bang, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others.
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Who gets to call themselves a poet?
“Poet is not some mystical status to which one can ascend only after years of study or initiation into some secret club. It doesn’t require you to wear a black turtleneck and mope around, or to live in the woods and grow a wild beard like Whitman. It doesn’t require you to belong to any particular social group, race, religion or sexual orientation. To be a poet requires only that you read and write poetry. Simple as that. Immerse yourself in poems, play with language, make stuff.”
on teaching and writing
“I’m a teacher because I’m a writer—that is, when I am teaching poetry, I’m teaching it the way I understand it to work and exist in the world. I use my practice as the foundation of what we do in class.”
Praise for Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthology
“‘Write a poem for your future self to find it,’ cajole Huey and Kaneko, the editors of this accessible and generative textbook, the first in a long time to be a great poetry primer, a fine anthology, and a useful encyclopedia. Elements, modes, images, surprise—the concepts and their applications are all here, detailed and methodically presented, the clear writing always a pleasure. Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology should be the go-to book for teachers and students alike, all of whom may well be writing to find their future selves.”
— Alan Michael Parker
“With Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, it is as if Huey and Kaneko have been looking over my shoulder at my class notes and have built a streamlined textbook specifically to meet my needs. Collected in one volume are chapters of practical advice and explanation about poetic elements (including a periodic table!), along with an amazing, truly up-to-date anthology of example poems. Most appropriate for students new to poetry, this book will serve as a solid review text for more advanced students as well.”
— Sandy Longhorn
“For a while now, many of us have seen the need to redefine—and hopefully to reinvigorate—the teaching of poetry writing. Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, by stressing ‘practice rather than interpretation,’ have made a poetry writing textbook that dances in the mind, even as it takes all of us back to the pleasure and hard work of our art. They are generous with the “elements†? of poetry that animate their own teaching. Their illustrative anthology at the end may be the best collection of “contemporary classic†? poems currently available. This is a book we—all of us, from beginners to wizened masters—could use in the classroom or simply sit down and read.”
— Keith Taylor