The mind's eye: a guide to writing poetry

Preface

Introduction: Mind's eye

Imagery

Sound and idiom

Inspiration

Poet's note card

1: Words That Paint, Colors That Speak

Painting pictures with words

Power of a single image

Rendering human drama

Verb as catalyst

Exploring with images

Quicksand of abstraction

Note on revision

Getting started

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

2: Lively Image vs The Deadly Cliche

Observations that surprise

Metaphors and similes

Listing

Interior world

Other senses

Dramatizing everyday subjects

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

3: 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

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

4: Conflict And Transformation

Problem of the human heart

Familial tension, personal conflict

Transformative moment

Portraying stasis

Sentiment vs sentimentality

Revising for clarity

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

5: Do Poems Have Plot?

Keeping your reader on edge

Lyric interludes

Braiding

Poems of childhood

Poems of adolescence

Closure

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

6: Empathy And Creativity

Becoming the other

Historical persona

Dramatizing current events

Myth

Psyche under pressure

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

7: Leaping Through Time And Space

Poetic sequence

Multiple pictures

Multiple stories

Flashback, narratives, and the lyric

Nonnumerical sequences

Revising toward the sequence

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

8: Frames And Forms

Free verse and the question of form

Syllabics

Metrics and blank verse

Rhyming

Sonnet

Villanelle

Sestina

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

9: Stanzas, Prose, And The Field Of The Page

Organizing words on the page

Uniform stanzas

Aeration

Visual caesurae

Prose poem

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

10: Surrealism

Logic of alogical images

Nonsense vs instinct

Dream poems

Dreamtime and magical realism

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

11: Writing About Sadness

Elegy

Imagery and restraint

Threnody

Expectation and surprise

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

12: Poetry And Eros

Predicament of the love poem

Conflict and tone

Language of desire

Erotic poetry

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

13: Poetry Of Witness

Restraint

War and witness

Writing about racism

Poems about gender

Question of culpability

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

14: Stretching The Imagination

Next challenge

Eckphrasis

Drama of sport

Serious business of the funny poem

Divinity and uncertainty

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

15: Breaking The Rules, Nurturing The Weird

Eccentricity and voice

Being different

Associative journeys

Undermining the rules of grammar

Enigma poems

Poet's note card

Writing exercises

Appendix: 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

Simultaneous submissions

Rejection and acceptance

Credits

Index of critical terms

Index of authors and poem titles.