A Poet's Guide to Poetry

The author

Mary Kinzie is an American poet and critic who spent much of her career at Northwestern University, where she directed the creative writing program. She is that valuable double figure — a practicing poet with a critic's rigor — and the book carries both. In 2008 she received the Folger Shakespeare Library's Hardison Poetry Prize, notable as the rare American award that honors a poet for teaching as well as writing, which suits a book so plainly born of the classroom.

The book

Published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press (a second edition followed). Its three parts move from the style, grammar, and rhetoric of poems, through the control of time in meter and rhythm — including the "four freedoms" of free verse — to practical chapters on writing in received forms.

How it has aged

As a standard: one of the reference craft books teachers keep recommending, alongside the handful of others in its class. Its difficulty is both the point and the occasional complaint — a guide that assumes ambition. Two decades on, it remains a working tool rather than a period piece.

For more context

The companion craft shelf: Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form; and, for a gentler on-ramp, Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem.

Sources

• A Poet's Guide to Poetry (University of Chicago Press)
• Mary Kinzie (Poetry Foundation)
• Mary Kinzie (Wikipedia)