The gold standard of poetry writing books, Writing Poems, 7/e is a comprehensive, easy-to-use guide that will help aspiring poets to create meaningful works.

Preface: To The Teacher

1. STARTING OUT: An Introduction

Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language, Sharon Bryan

Word Magic

Diction

Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden

Syntax

Barbed Wire, Henry Taylor

Pruning and Weeding

Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen

In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound

Clarity, Obscurity and Ambiguity

Gubbinal, Wallace Stevens

Questions and Suggestions

Famous, Naomi Shihab Nye

Home is so Sad, Philip Larkin

Abstraction, Geoffrey Brock

The Way Things Work, Jorie Graham

Night in Iowa, Deborah Ager

Bent to the Earth, Blas Manuel De Luna

Realism, Czeslaw Milosz

Dolor, Theodore Roethke

PART I: FORM

2. VERSE

Line

Metaphors of a Magnifico, Wallace Stevens

Form

A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman

Balance, Imbalance

The Racer's Widow, Louise Gluck

Letter in July, Elizabeth Spires

Questions and Suggestions

Traveling through the Dark, William Stafford

Balance, Marilyn Nelson

In the Museum of Your Last Day, Patrick Phillips

Unconditional Election, David Baker

Storm Window, Conrad Hilberry

Thrall, Carolyn Kizer

A Grave, Marianne Moore

Off-Season at the Edge of the World, Debora Greger

3. MAKING THE LINE (I)

Syllable-Stress Meter

Rhythm

The Lengths of Metrical Lines

Substitutions and Variations

A Little Scanning

Out, Out-, Robert Frost

Questions and Suggestions

Loveliest of Trees, A.E. Houseman

Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

Signs, Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Hamlen Brook, Richard Wilbur

Her Web, Erin Belieu

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

Epitaph on a Tyrant, W.H. Auden

Learning by Doing, Howard Nemerov

4. MAKING THE LINE (II)

Nonmetrical Verse: Longer Lines

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, Walt Whitman

Nonmetrical Verse: Lines of Mixed Length

People and a Heron, Robinson Jeffers

Nonmetrical Verse: Shorter Lines

Pastoral, William Carlos Williams

Poem, William Carlos Williams

Syllabics and Prose Poems

To a Steam Roller, Marianne Moore

Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand, Robert Bly

Questions and Suggestions

Balloons, Sylvia Plath

Blue Plums, Geri Doran

At Pegasus, Terrance Hayes

The Truth Is Forced, May Swenson

Pure, Carol Frost

By the Charles River, Scott Hightower

Bacchae, Terese Svoboda

My Dates, Jeffrey Skinner

Visible Form

The Silence of Women, Liz Rosenberg

Smart, Bruce Bennett

A Night Without Stars, Nancy Eimers

Easter Wings, George Herbert

The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

Repetition

Recuerdo, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Catania to Rome, Richmond Lattimore

Alliteration and Assonance

Power to the People, Howard Nemerov

Rhyme

Arms and the Boy, Wilfred Owen

After Apple-Picking, Robert Frost

Onomatopoeia

Player Piano, John Updike

Questions and Suggestions

Dear Petrarch, Cate Marvin

Bleeder, Stephen Dobyns

Don't Look Back, Kay Ryan

January II, Charles Wright

After the Trial, Weldon Kees

Postolka (Prague), Christian Wiman

Reapers, Jean Toomer

To Autumn, John Keats

PART II: CONTENT

6. SUBJECT MATTER

Men at My Father's Funeral, William Matthews

Subjects and Objects

A Hill of Beans, Rita Dove

Primary Colors, Cathy Song

Charles Harper Webb, Charles Harper Webb

Memory

Ground Swell, Mark Jarman

Presenting

My Papa's Waltz, Theodore Roethke

Neutral Tones, Thomas Hardy

Implication and Focus

First Death in Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop

Questions and Suggestions

Winter, Marie Ponsot

The Beautician, Thom Gunn

The Guides, Rigoberto Gonzalez

Brad Pitt, Aaron Smith

Bitch, Carolyn Kizer

The Tropics in New York, Claude McKay

Detroit Moi, Al Young

The Death of a Small Town, B. H. Fairchild

The White Dress, Lynn Emanuel

Figuratively Speaking

Look Here, Pamela Alexander

I heard a fly buzz-when I died-, Emily Dickinson

We Wear the Mask, Paul Lawrence Dunbar

A Name for Everything

Putting a Burden Down, Molly Peacock

Pattern and Motif

My Grandmother's Love Letters, Hart Crane

Conceits

Music at Night, Mary Oliver

A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning, John Donne

Metaphoric Implication

Sonnet 30, William Shakespeare

The House Slave, Rita Dove

Questions and Suggestions

The Empire in the Air, Kevin Prufer

Song, Frank Bidart

What Are Years?, Marianne Moore

Rowing, Jeffrey Harrison

X, Carl Phillips

Far Niente, Heather McHugh

School Dance, Bruce Snider

Blue, Reginald Shepard

Siren, Amy Gerstler

Adlestrop, Edward Thomas

Narration and Action

Minor Miracle, Marilyn Nelson

Understanding Fiction, Henry Taylor

Persona

Pit Pony, William Greenway

Daisies, Louise Gluck

Point of View

My Last Duchess, Robert Browning

When Someone Dies Young, Robin Becker

Tone

Lunch by the Grand Canal, Richard Lyons

Questions and Suggestions

Personals, C.D. Wright

The Wood-pile, Robert Frost

Halflife, Meghan O'Rourke

Last Day, Timothy Liu

The Shadow-Line, William Logan

Butane, Kerosene, Gasoline, Ann Townsend

Unyieldingly Present, Lawrence Joseph

The Hare, Henri Cole

9. THE MYSTERIES OF LANGUAGE

The Sense of Nonsense

Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

A Guide to the Stone Age, James Tate

What Do I See?, Gertrude Stein

The Logic of the Analogic

Daytrip to Paradox, Dara Wier

At North Farm, John Ashbery

Ordinary Strangeness

Ordeal, Nina Cassian

Translation

The Deaf and Blind, Paul Eluard

Questions and Suggestions

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Hill, Anthony Hecht

Remember the Trains? Martha Collins

Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night, Wayne Miller

Indifference, Cesare Pavese

A Hunger So Honed, Tracy K. Smith

Everything, Srikanth Reddy

A Story About the Body, Robert Hass

PART III: PROCESS

10. FINDING THE POEM

Reading the Late Henry James, Natasha Saje

Imitations and Models

Variations on a Text by Vallejo, Donald Justice

Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca, Cesar Vallejo

Sources, Currents

Sunday Afternoons, Yusef Komunyakaa

Emotion and Thought

After great pain, a formal feeling comes-, Emily Dickinson

The Widow's Lament in Springtime, William Carlos Williams

The Hawk, Marianne Boruch

Getting into Words

After Long Silence, W.B. Yeats

Keeping a Poem Going

Questions and Suggestions

A Description of the Morning, Jonathan Swift

24th and Mission, Joy Katz

Ballade Beginning with a Line by Robert Bly, R.S. Gwynn

The Starlet, John Poch

The Other Cold War, Adrian Blevins

Visitation, Kathy Fagan

Song, Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Nearing Rome, Rick Barot

A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman

Exploring

Trying Out

Focusing

The Monkeys, Marianne Moore

Shaping

The Fish, Marianne Moore

Swimmer in the Rain, Robert Wallace

Drafts

Questions and Suggestions

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, Richard Wilbur

The Edge of the Hurricane, Amy Clampitt

Macaroni & Cheese, Laura Kasischke

ABC, Robert Pinsky

Immediate Revision, Chase Twichell

The Day Lady Died, Frank O'Hara

Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries, Stanley Plumly

The Man. His Bowl. His Raspberries. Claudia Rankine

The Growth of a Poet

Going Public

Writing Communities

Getting Organized

Questions and Suggestions

Rain, Sidney Wade

Poem, Donald Justice

Workshop, Billy Collins

Torch Sonnet III, Sarah Murphy

Winter Conception, Eleanor Wilner

Meanwhile, Richard Siken

The Great Poet Returns, Mark Strand

The Next Poem, Dana Gioia

Appendix I: A Brief Glossary of Forms

Appendix II: Notes to the Questions and Suggestions

Appendix III: Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Index of Authors and Titles

Index of Terms