Mind's Eye, The: A Guide to Writing Poetry
©2008 |Pearson | Available
Kevin Clark
©2008 |Pearson | Available
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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.
Semester System::
http://kevinclarkpoet.com/pdf/SEMESTERSYLLABUS.pdf
Quarter System:
http://kevinclarkpoet.com/pdf/QUARTERSYLLABUS.pdf
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Mind's Eye
Imagery
Sound and Idiom
Imagination
One
Words that Paint, Images that Speak
Painting Pictures with Words
The Power of a Single Image
Rendering Human Drama
The Verb as Catalyst
Exploring with Images
The Quicksand of Abstraction
A Note on Revision
Getting Started
The Poet’s Note Card
Two
The Lively Image vs. The Deadly Cliché
Observations that Surprise
Metaphors and Similes
Listing
The Interior World
The Other Senses
Dramatizing Everyday Subjects
The Poet's Note Card
Three
The Sound of Contemporary Poetry
Why Poems Don’t Sing Like Songs
Conversational Poetry
Musical Poetry
How We Talk Back Home
Poems That Go Fast
Revising for Sound
The Poet's Note Card
Four
Conflict and Transformation
The Problem of the Human Heart
Tension and Conflict
The Transformative Moment
Portraying Stasis
Sentiment vs. Sentimentality
Revising for Clarity
The Poet's Note Card
Five
Do Poems Have Plot?
Keeping Your Reader on Edge
Lyric Interludes
Narrative and the Transformative Moment
Braiding
Heightening the Drama
Stories of Childhood
Closure
The Poet's Note Card
Six
Empathy and Creativity
Becoming the Other
The Historical Persona
Dramatizing Current Events
Myth
The Psyche Under Pressure
The Poet's Note Card
Seven
Leaping through Time and Space
The Poetic Sequence
Multiple Pictures
Multiple Narratives
Non-Numerical Sequences
Revising toward the Sequence
The Poet's Note Card
Eight
Frames and Forms
Free Verse and the Question of Form
Syllabics, Metrics and Blank Verse
Rhyming
The Sonnet
The Villanelle
The Sestina
The Poet's Note Card
Nine
Stanzas, Prose, and the Field of the Page
Organizing Words on the Page
The Prose Poem
Aeration
Visual Caesurae
The Poet's Note Card
Ten
Surrealism
The Logic of Alogical Images
Nonsense vs. Instinct
Dream Poems
Dreamtime and Magical Realism
The Poet's Note Card
Eleven
Writing about Sadness
The Elegy
Imagery and Restraint
Threnody
Expectation and Surprise
The Poet's Note Card
Twelve
Poetry and Eros
The Predicament of the Love Poem
Conflict and Tone
The Language of Desire
Erotic Poetry
The Poet's Note Card
Thirteen
The Poetry of Witness
Restraint
War and Witness
Writing about Racism
Poems about Gender
The Question of Culpability
The Poet's Note Card
Fourteen
Stretching the Imagination
The Next Challenge
Eckphrasis
The Drama of Sport
The Serious Business of the Funny Poem
Divinity and Uncertainty
Philosophical Imagery
The Poet's Note Card
Fifteen
Breaking the Rules, Nurturing the Weird
Eccentricity and Voice
Being Different
Associative Journeys
Undermining the Rules of Grammar
Enigma Poems
The Poet's Note Card
Appendix
The Culture of Poetry
Writing Groups
Public Readings
How to Get Published
• Choosing Journals
• Submitting Poems by Mail
• Submitting Poems by Email
• Keeping a Submissions Log
• On Simultaneous Submissions
• Rejection and Acceptance
The Poet's Note Card
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Clark
©2008  | Pearson  | 272 pp
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."
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