Most texts on creative writing emphasize either sources of inspiration or strategies for editing. The process of getting from initial inspiration to final draft isn’t often dealt with in any practical way. Writing and Workshopping Poetry focuses on all three phases of the process of composition: finding the material; building and developing the poem from rough draft to complete work; editing and refining. The text offers everything students and instructors need: extensive notes written in an accessible, conversational style; seventy-five writing exercises; and about a hundred poems chosen from a wide range of sources, from sixteenth-century sonnets to experimental constrained forms, with an emphasis on exciting poems by contemporary American and Canadian poets. Each chapter concludes with a brief, point-form summary of major learning objectives as well as a review list of useful terms.

How to Read (and Write About) Poetry invites students and others curious about poetry to join the critical conversation about a genre many find a little mystifying, even intimidating. In an accessible, engaging manner, this book introduces the productive questions, reading strategies, literary terms, and secondary research tips that will empower readers to participate in literary analysis. Holbrook explicates a number of poems, initiating readers into critical discourse while highlighting key poetic terms. The explications are followed by selections of related works, so the book thus offers what amounts to a brief anthology, ideal for a poetry unit or introductory class on poetry and poetics. A chapter on meter illuminates the rhythmic dimension of poetry and guides readers through methods of scansion. The second edition is updated throughout and includes a fresh selection of poems and the latest MLA citation guidance.

The Puzzle of Poetry offers students a readable, reliable guide to understanding poetry. Instead of carving poems up into their elements, The Puzzle of Poetry describes how experienced readers of poems go about understanding them. Each line, sentence, or syntactical unit in a poem is a clue to the “puzzle.” As with crossword puzzles, figuring out the answer to one clue can help you figure out the answer to others. This book teaches the reader to check what they know in a poem against what else they know to find meaning, a systematic but creative approach that can help language to come alive. Each chapter contains a lively and personal discussion of one part of the art of reading poetry; a short guide to writing about poetry is also included. The book introduces students to a variety of poems, from Anglo-Saxon verse to Hamilton and Jay-Z.

Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The book incorporates autoethnography and asks readers to consider writing histories, influences, processes, and tools in their own lives. Short readings are included for each chapter. Designed for composition courses with a Writing About Writing focus or courses in Writing Studies, A Writing Studies Primer is a distinctive, visually engaging introduction to writing through its material culture.

Write Moves is an invitation for the student to understand and experience creative writing in the larger frame of humanities education. The practical instruction offered comes in the form of “moves” or tactics for the apprentice writer to try. But the title also speaks to a core value of this project: that creative writing exists to move us. The book focuses on concise, human-voiced instruction in poetry, the short story, and the short creative nonfiction essay. Emphasis on short forms allows the beginning student to appreciate lessons in craft without being overwhelmed by lengthy model texts; diverse examples of these genres are offered in the anthology.

This is a book on how to read the essay, one that demonstrates how reading is inextricably tied to the art of writing. It aims to treat the essay with the close attention that has been given to other literary genres, and in doing so it suggests the beauty and depth of the form as a whole. At once personal appreciations and acute critical assessments, the pieces collected here broaden our perspective on the essay as a major literary art, tracing its history from William Hazlitt to Joan Didion.