The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach

These exercises are quite involved. I was hoping for some exercises for writing poetry in the high school classroom. These took quite a bit of time, but resulted in some good poems.

The Practice of Poetry is a book that you (sometimes as an individual, sometimes in a group) do, more than a book you read. It doesn't have a lot of data on the technical aspects of poetry (rhyme, meter, style, etc.) It also doesn't address the various schools and movements of poetry. 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).

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. It would be great if there was a new edition of this book.

But the exercises are time-independent, and if you do them, your poetry will most likely improve.

I discovered this book during my MA program a few years back. At the time, I'd not seen anything quite like it, aside from Lew Turco's Book of Forms, a book that I enjoyed. 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. It's filled with great generative poetry writing exercises, each accompanied by a short discussion written by the poet/professor who contributed the piece. 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. David St. 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. I'll never forget a shy young student writing a monologue in Sherlock Holmes' voice in my workshop.

Other assignments do come off as flaky, and yet the contributors admit as such. 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. Even in a less formal workshop, I'd be reticent about chanting. Of course, if chanting is something you enjoy . . .

The book concludes with two or three essays about revision that every poet needs to read. Beginning poets especially can benefit the wisdom herein.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is it variety. The book includes assignments from all ends of the aesthetic spectrum--from Jackson Mac Low to Dana Gioia. 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.

I teach an 8th grade Language Arts Class in rural Washington State. I found our textbook to be bland and typical. I was looking for some work for my students to actually learn how to write poetry correctly. This book does this.

This is a wide ranging collection of poetry exercises written by poets who also teach. With over 90 exercises (most no more than two pages long), you'll find they are various in "approach, style, and content, and cover a great deal of territory"(excerpted from the intro.). For that reason, some of the exercises can come across irrelevant, as another reviewer mentioned, or juvenile (ie: "auctioning" off your line to another student in class). However, keep in mind that these exercises can be re-drafted or custom-built to the needs of the class. Additionally, the narratives that follow each exercise are a fantastic way to learn about the exercise from the teacher's perspective: what works, what doesn't, what kind of students have difficulty with the exercise, etc. Unlike most exercise books that just spit out what to do, the teacher expands on why this particular exercise is a useful one for the student and what the exercise may help the student create.

My only gripe is I would have liked to have an appendix containing some of the poems that the exercises reference. This would be useful in seeing what the exercise strives to create or attain. That minor complaint aside, I find this to be a resourceful book for poets of all levels - give these a try and see what happens!