The language of poetry is rich and complex—from abstract language to voice, with all the enjambment, Nashers and sprung rhythm in between. The Poetry Dictionary illuminates and unravels it all with clear, working definitions. In addition, you'll find vivid and thorough descriptions, along with examples from classic and contemporary poetry, Greek to avant-garde, to illustrate the terms. In many cases, several different poems are used to show the evolution of the form, making The Poetry Dictionary a unique anthology of the art. It's a guide to the poetry of today and yesterday, with intriguing hints as to what tomorrow holds. Author/poet John Drury focuses on those terms that are useful to students and teachers. These are words you need to effectively discuss the craft—concepts that will broaden and stimulate your own creative processes. Drury's from-experience viewpoint and spirited voice keep The Poetry Dictionary relevant, immediate and not only easy to read, but hard not to.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

A useful aid for all committed and aspiring poets. A good rhyming dictionary is an essential tool for all writers of verse. This volume is compactly arranged to allow writers to find the rhymes they need quickly and easily.

Defines and gives examples of words, concepts, and types of information that poets and non-poets will want to have explained.

This handbook defines the tools, terms, and techniques of poetry. Arranged alphabetically from "accent" to "zeugma," The Poets Dictionary is clear, superb, and complete.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Authors include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, and Harryette Mullen.