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Mind's Eye, The: A Guide to Writing Poetry

Kevin Clark, Cal Poly and The Rainier Writers Workshop

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Overview

Description

Focusing on imagery and sound, The Mind’s Eye is concise, inexpensive, and handy - and is the only poetry writing textbook designed specifically for the college term.

Featuring a progressive gradation of writing exercises, The Mind’s Eye stresses the foundational importance of imagery as well as sound in contemporary poetry. The textbook guides students through a variety of discussions, models and prompts designed to give them fluency in the major aspects of contemporary poetry writing: imagery, sound, implication, conflict, the lyric (and lyricism), structure, portraiture, narrative, sequencing, surrealism, and other facets of the discipline, especially revision. Built on the author’s three decades of creative writing pedagogy and written in clear, active prose that instructs without condescension, The Mind’s Eye features The Poet’s Note Card, a concise summary of main ideas at the end of each chapter. It discusses traditional form and provides templates for the sonnet and reduces anxiety about writing on difficult topics, including mortality, eros, religion, and politics. Compact and handy, the textbook provides information on how to form friendly poetry writing groups, how to arrange and give poetry readings, and how to publish poems in journals. Teachers will also like the fact that it sells at a lower cost than almost all other textbook options, thus allowing them to assign additional volumes of poetry without fear of burdening students economically.

Features

The Mind’s Eye coordinates a flexible sequence of chapters with a typical fifteen-week college semester (while also adapting easily to a quarter system). Teachers don’t have to spend time creating a complex syllabus, and students will develop their writing skills at an efficient pace.Because other textbooks attempt to address the trade market and the college market,not one other poetry writing textbook offers this teacher-friendly arrangement.
The Mind’s Eye balances the foundational importance of both imagery and sound - at the expense of neither. The Mind’s Eye helps students develop their imagination by focusing on the power of imagery and the many different types of sound available to them. Many poetry writing textbooks confuse sound with traditional form, but not this one.
Promoting usability by its compact, handy size and selling at a low cost, The Mind’s Eye allows professors to assign additional volumes of poetry without fear of burdening students’ backpacks or wallets.
Written in enthusiastic, clear prose, the textbook explains the need for conflict and the transformative moment, while often placing the student right in the middle of the creative process by describing the different, often unpredictable, highly fluid stages of the process itself, including revision.
Descriptions of the writng process also take place throughout the textbook, starting with the introduction.
Each chapter offers numerous writing exercises, including those that are highly specific and those that are quite general, both of which proceed throughout the book toward greater complexity.
Recognizing that most poetry is written in free verse today, The Mind’s Eye nevertheless offers an enthusiastic discussion of traditional form, even providing a blank template for the sonnet.
The textbook provides a wide variety of many model poems by a dramatically diverse group of contemporary poetsand three student poets. More than ninety model poems are provided.
The textbook reduces student - and teacher - anxiety about the pitfalls of writing on difficult topics, including mortality, eros, religion, and politics.
This textbook provides an appendix that offers students further entrance into the culture of poetry, providing information on how to form friendly poetry writing groups, how to arrange and give poetry readings, and how to publish poems in journals.
Sample syllabi are available for the semester and quarter system:

          Semester System::
           http://kevinclarkpoet.com/pdf/SEMESTERSYLLABUS.pdf

            Quarter System:
            http://kevinclarkpoet.com/pdf/QUARTERSYLLABUS.pdf

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Digital

Paper

book cover — Mind's Eye, The: A Guide to Writing Poetry

Clark

©2008 | Pearson | 272 pp

Format	Paper
ISBN-13:	9780205498239
Suggested retail price	$53.32
Availability	Available

About the Author(s)

An award-winning poet, Kevin Clark is the author of the collection In the Evening of No Warning. His poems and essays have appeared widely in places such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award, he teaches at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. He lives with his wife and children on California’s central coast, where he continues to play upper division softball "despite legs like ancient concrete and more injuries than Evel Knievel."

Relevant Courses

Creative Writing (Literature & Creative Writing)