Kim Addonizio

from acrostics to rubaiyats to villanelles

Steinberg, Sybil. Writing for Your Life. Pushcart Press, 1992. Writing for Your Life Two. Pushcart Press, 1995. Interviews with contemporary writers, mostly American, about the art of writing and the job of publishing.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. W. W. Norton, 1993. This collection of compassionate, philosophical letters about the creative spirit, written from the great poet to a young aspiring writer, should be on every poet’s shelf.

Turco, Lewis. The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. University Press of New England, 1986. This small, easy-to-understand book on metrics, sonics, and tropes boasts a comprehensive listing and description of over 175 traditional verse forms.

Handy indexes at the back: meter and scansion, definitions of all the forms in the book, and further reading on traditional forms and prosody.

: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

Hirshfield, Jane, ed. Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. HarperCollins, 1994. A comprehensive collection of poems, prayers, and songs that represent the spiritual life of women from the world’s earliest identified author (a Sumerian moon priestess) to the women of the first half of the twentieth century. Includes poets as diverse as Makeda, Queen of Sheba, Sappho, Lal Ded, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Bronte, Owl Woman, H. D., Anna Akhmatova, and Sub-ok.

Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. W. W. Norton, 1994. A compilation representing American avant-garde poetry, including the leading Beat and New York-school poets, the projectivists and “deep image” poets, among others.

Story Line Press, 1994. The editor chooses to define formal poetry broadly, including such things as chants and pun-poems as well as the familiar traditional forms like sonnets and villanelles. Each writer is represented with two to six poems, and contributes comments about formal verse.

that the common thread they share is a “resistance to the pervasive style of late 20th century verse, with its debilitating preference for the tepid, mannered and opaque.”