A Poet's Craft

A Poet's Crafttranscends the built-in limitations of current books, combining the best of all three types of poetry-writing guides: textbooks for academic use, general guides to writing poetry, and guides to writing in form. Like the 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 the general poetry guides, it has a tone lively and mature enough for the non-undergraduate, and includes sections on journaling and inspiration, revision, publishing, and even how to assemble a poetry book. Like the form guides,A Poet's Craftprovides an introduction to meter and to writing formal poetry. Finch's book goes further than any form guide now available to give readers a thorough, eclectic, and exciting introduction to poetic form.Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, ofAn Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, and author ofThe Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse,Eve, andCalendars. 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.