Description
Book SynopsisA text for practiced poets, this book offers a springboard beyond the basics into more daring poetic traditions, experimentation and methods. It lays out the myriad conversations influencing contemporary poetics, paying attention to its roots in historical and theoretical thinking. With a focus on innovation and breaking established boundaries, Advanced Poetry introduces you to the poetics shaping the contemporary literary moment, first guiding you through the contexts and principles of these forms using a range of practical examples, before prompting you to pick up the pen yourself.
Spanning decades and continents, and covering the rich field of poets writing today, this book shows how to read, explicate, and write poetry and includes discussion of:
- received traditions and innovative forms
- confessional and epistolary poetry
- aesthetic experimentation with voice
- methods and theories developed by early Surrealists
-deep image and the poetic
Trade Review
In the charged intimacy of whispered dish or conspiracy, Nuernberger and Zeller geek with robust gusto and gleeful rigor over poetry: its making and what it makes of us. Here’s a fleet textbook that inspires possibility, offers generous guidance with a light-touch, and in the process, sneaks in a sly, keen, and often subversive anthology of poems gathered from a wide view of time and place. This is more than a textbook; it’s a compelling invitation. * Douglas Kearney *
Advanced Poetry “offers readers a radical methodology to studying poetics, one that simultaneously breaks boundaries for what textbooks might achieve (similar, perhaps, to Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey), while also harkening back to formal and historical poetics.” It is “conversational, and it somehow simultaneously introduces you to new poets and traditions without ever making you feel inadequate for not knowing something.” I “love that it starts each chapter with poems” and that these poems are “diverse and contemporary.” And “while some craft books feel technical and dry, this one never loses its focus on poetry’s magic.” * From Laura Read’s M.F.A. Poetry Workshop students (Laura Read, Professor of Poetry, MFA program at Eastern Washington University, USA) *
Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology authored by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller offers readers a way to think about our own work in the context of our collective lineage as poets. I love the way each chapter opens with a diverse selection of poems, which allows the reader the chance to experience the poems before reading the editors’ discussion of them. And I also loved the writing in this book: it is both scholarly and accessible, poetic and sometimes personal. I will read and teach this book for the rest of my career. * Laura Read, Professor of Poetry, MFA program at Eastern Washington University, USA *
Table of Contents
CONTENTS PATHWAYS INTO POETIC LINEAGES Foreword: The End and the Beginning An Invitation to Compose an Ars Poetica Before Reading Introduction and Notes to Readers, Writers, and Teachers Who is this book for? How is this book organized? Why begin each chapter with poems . . . ? Do I need to read the book in order? What pedagogical principles guide this textbook? Some Notes on Teaching This Book Chapter 1: Sound, Shape, & Space: Received and Invented Forms Chapter 2: Telling Secrets: Confessions, Epistolaries, & the Lyric I Chapter 3: The Poem in Telephone Lines & Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry Chapter 4: Writing Out of Surrealism Chapter 5: Duende, Deep Image, & The Poetics of Spells Chapter 6: The Poetics of Liberation Chapter 7: Writing the Body Chapter 8: The Racial Imaginary Chapter 9: Writing in the Field Chapter 10: Docupoetics & Other Forms of Lyric Research APPENDICES: MAPPING YOUR WRITING LIFE Practical Matters Creating an Inspiring and Supportive Workshop Community Strategies for Revision Some Notes on Assembling a Collection Potential Assignments & Professional Materials Submitting Poems for Publication Writing an Artist Statement Acknowledgements Index
