Concise and accessible, this guide to teaching the art of poetry from Shakespeare to contemporary poets enables anyone to learn about how poets approach their art. Teachers can use this book to explore any facet or era of poetry. Any reader can use it as an entryway into the art of poetry. Teaching the Art of Poetry shows poetry as a multi-faceted artistic process rather than a mystery on a pedestal. It demystifies the art of poetry by providing specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts for each element of the art. It is a nuts-and-bolts approach that encourages teachers and...

Winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Maine theme (2006)

For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the "back to the land" movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither statement nor protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled in to a life that...

The focus of Baron Wormser's poetry over more than three decades has been the human drama of our trying to shape what is misshapen. In this, his tenth collection, he takes on a dizzying range of subjects from Diane Arbus to playground basketball to the fall of the Berlin Wall to Prospero to a suicide inquest. In all his poems, he pursues the complex gist that will at once betray and reveal the welter of feeling that informs a moment, a scene, or a life.

For readers of poetry this book is the culmination of well over three decades of poetry writing, a book into which much experience of...