Mind's Eye, The: A Guide to Writing Poetry, 1st edition

Published by Pearson (October 19, 2007) © 2008

  • Kevin Clark
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Focusing on imagery and sound, The Mind’s Eye is concise, inexpensive, and handy - and is the only poetry writing textbook designed specifically for the college term. 

Featuring a progressive gradation of writing exercises, The Mind’s Eye stresses the foundational importance of imagery as well as sound in contemporary poetry. The textbook guides students through a variety of discussions, models and prompts designed to give them fluency in the major aspects of contemporary poetry writing: imagery, sound, implication, conflict, the lyric (and lyricism), structure, portraiture, narrative, sequencing, surrealism, and other facets of the discipline, especially revision. Built on the author’s three decades of creative writing pedagogy and written in clear, active prose that instructs without condescension, The Mind’s Eye features The Poet’s Note Card, a concise summary of main ideas at the end of each chapter. It discusses traditional form and provides templates for the sonnet and reduces anxiety about writing on difficult topics, including mortality, eros, religion, and politics. Compact and handy, the textbook provides information on how to form friendly poetry writing groups, how to arrange and give poetry readings, and how to publish poems in journals. Teachers will also like the fact that it sells at a lower cost than almost all other textbook options, thus allowing them to assign additional volumes of poetry without fear of burdening students economically.

Preface

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction

The Mind's Eye

 

Imagery

Sound and Idiom

Imagination

 

One

Words that Paint, Images that Speak

 

Painting Pictures with Words

The Power of a Single Image

Rendering Human Drama

The Verb as Catalyst

Exploring with Images

The Quicksand of Abstraction

A Note on Revision 

Getting Started

The Poet’s Note Card

 

Two

The Lively Image vs. The Deadly Cliché

 

Observations that Surprise

Metaphors and Similes

Listing

The Interior World

The Other Senses

Dramatizing Everyday Subjects

The Poet's Note Card

 

Three

The Sound of Contemporary Poetry                                                  

 

Why Poems Don’t Sing Like Songs

Conversational Poetry

Musical Poetry

How We Talk Back Home

Poems That Go Fast

Revising for Sound

The Poet's Note Card

 

Four

Conflict and Transformation

 

The Problem of the Human Heart

Tension and Conflict

The Transformative Moment

Portraying Stasis

Sentiment vs. Sentimentality

Revising for Clarity

The Poet's Note Card

 

Five

Do Poems Have Plot?

 

Keeping Your Reader on Edge

Lyric Interludes

Narrative and the Transformative Moment

Braiding

Heightening the Drama

Stories of Childhood

Closure

The Poet's Note Card

 

Six

Empathy and Creativity

 

Becoming the Other

The Historical Persona

Dramatizing Current Events

Myth

The Psyche Under Pressure

The Poet's Note Card

 

Seven

Leaping through Time and Space

 

The Poetic Sequence

Multiple Pictures

Multiple Narratives

Non-Numerical Sequences

Revising toward the Sequence

The Poet's Note Card

 

Eight

Frames and Forms

 

Free Verse and the Question of Form

Syllabics, Metrics and Blank Verse

Rhyming

The Sonnet

The Villanelle

The Sestina

The Poet's Note Card

 

Nine

Stanzas, Prose, and the Field of the Page

 

Organizing Words on the Page

The Prose Poem

Aeration

Visual Caesurae

The Poet's Note Card

 

Ten

Surrealism

 

The Logic of Alogical Images

Nonsense vs. Instinct

Dream Poems

Dreamtime and Magical Realism

The Poet's Note Card

 

Eleven

Writing about Sadness

 

The Elegy

Imagery and Restraint

Threnody

Expectation and Surprise

The Poet's Note Card

 

Twelve

Poetry and Eros

 

The Predicament of the Love Poem

Conflict and Tone

The Language of Desire

Erotic Poetry

The Poet's Note Card

 

Thirteen

The Poetry of Witness

 

Restraint                 

War and Witness

Writing about Racism

Poems about Gender

The Question of Culpability

The Poet's Note Card

 

Fourteen

Stretching the Imagination

 

The Next Challenge

Eckphrasis

The Drama of Sport

The Serious Business of the Funny Poem

Divinity and Uncertainty

Philosophical Imagery

The Poet's Note Card

 

Fifteen

Breaking the Rules, Nurturing the Weird

 

Eccentricity and Voice

Being Different

Associative Journeys

Undermining the Rules of Grammar

Enigma Poems

The Poet's Note Card

 

 

Appendix

The Culture of Poetry

 

Writing Groups

Public Readings

How to Get Published

•               Choosing Journals

•               Submitting Poems by Mail

•               Submitting Poems by Email

•               Keeping a Submissions Log

•               On Simultaneous Submissions

•               Rejection and Acceptance

 

The Poet's Note Card

 

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