Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem is grounded in the belief that the best way to learn to write poetry - and improve one's writing in general - is through practice. The book's unique approach - teaching the elements of poetry through various poetic forms - encourages students to learn from existing models and to break free from pre-established constraints. In thirteen chapters centered on the sonnet, the haiku, and other traditional and not-so-traditional forms, the author demonstrates through numerous innovative exercises the many ways in which beginning poets can enrich their writing by studying and practicing poetic form.

KEY BENEFIT:  The gold standard of poetry writing books, Writing Poems, 8/e is a comprehensive, easy-to-use guide that will help aspiring poets to create meaningful works.   KEY TOPICS:  Introduces the aspiring poet to poetry's traditions, discipline and (hard-won) rewards, and guides more experienced poets through the deep oceans of making and remaking poems.  Filled with practical advice, this book enlivens the reader's understanding of poetry, illustrates poetic principles, and serves as a reliable guide book.  Writing Poems also ncludes an anthology of classic and contemporary poems.   MARKET:  For the aspiring poet.

The Poetry Toolkit: For Readers and Writers provides students with the essential intellectual and practical tools necessary to read, understand, and write poetry. Explains the most important elements of poetry in clear language and an easily accessible manner Offers readers both the expertise of an established scholar and the insights of a practicing poet Draws on examples from more than 1,500 years of English literature

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

At its core, geopoetics proposes that a connection between language and geology has become a significant development in post-World War II poetics. In Geopoetry, Dale Enggass argues that certain literary works enact geologic processes, such as erosion and deposition, and thereby suggest that language itself is a geologic--and not a solely human-based--process. Elements of language extend past human control and open onto an inhuman dimension, which raises the question of how literary works approach the representation of nonhuman realms. Enggass examines the work of Clark Coolidge, Robert Smithson, Ed Dorn, Maggie O'Sullivan, Jeremy Prynne, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, and Steve McCaffery, and he finds that while many of these authors are not traditionally connected to ecocritical writing, their innovations are central to ecocritical concerns. In treating language as a geological material, these authors interrogate the boundary between human and nonhuman realms and offer a model for a complex literary engagement with the Anthropocene.

Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World interrogates how humans' relation to and confrontation with the nonhuman world is captured in or through poetry. It brings together contributions that explore how modern poetry addresses human beings' relationship with the natural world, mirroring some of the most salient ecopoetic approaches to date. This collection is written from very different corners of the globe and significantly adds to the existing body of work because, on the one hand, it continues to focus on the greening of poetry and, on the other, it expands its critical implementation in poets not necessarily included in mainstream literary canons, by setting them side by side regardless of their cultural background. Contributors: Aamir Aziz, Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, Stephen Hock, Matilde Martín González, Leonor María Martínez Serrano, María Antonia Mezquita Fernández, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Catherine Woodward, Heather H. Yeung, Rabia Zaheer

Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays surveys ecopoetry from a global perspective across different historical epochs. Its comparative approach foregrounds the importance of ecopoetics within the context of distinct national literatures and cultures to reveal the ubiquitous intersection of poetry with ecocriticism. The collection analyzes environmental problems resulting from the legacies of colonialism and focuses on issues of environmental justice and indigenous issues as well as on the intersection of genocide studies and environmentalism. It also examines ecologically-informed modes of relating to the world. In particular, it engages with interactions between the human and nonhuman as well as mind and matter. Finally, it broadens the scope of place to include both the absent land of exiled peoples, and the urban, built environment.

Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume's essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.  Contributors offer readings of a diverse range of poets, few of whom have previously been read as nature writers--from midcentury Beat poet Michael McClure, Objectivist poet George Oppen, and African American poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden; to contemporary writers such as Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, hybrid/ collage poets Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Reilly, emerging QPOC poet Xandria Phillips, and members of the Olimpias disability culture artists' collective. While addressing preconceptions about the categories of nature writing and ecopoetics, contributors explore, challenge, and reimagine concepts that have been central to environmental discourse, from apocalypse and embodiment to toxicity and sustainability.  This collection of essays makes the compelling argument that ecopoetics should be read as "coextensive with post-1945 poetry and poetics," rather than as a subgenre or movement within it. It is essential reading for any student or scholar working on contemporary literature or in the environmental humanities today.  Contributors: Joshua Bennett, Rob Halpern, Matt Hooley, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Petra Kuppers, Michelle Niemann, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Joan Retallack, Joshua Schuster, Jonathan Skinner.  

Ecocritics and other literary scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. In this book, Scott Knickerbocker argues that it is time for the next step in ecocriticism: scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways. Ecopoetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world in the work of modern American poets--in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath. These poets relate to nature as a deep wellspring of meaning, although they all avoid using language the way most nature writers do, merely to reflect or refer directly to the world. Each of these poets, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what Knickerbocker terms sensuous poesis, the process of rematerializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to nonhuman nature. Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice--not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. In examining their work, Knickerbocker charts a new direction for ecocriticism.

In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the "romanticising" of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Reclaiming Romanticism rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship.

In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics. Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, The West Side of Any Mountain participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field. One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan's place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin. The West Side of Any Mountain will be of great interest to scholars and teachers working in the field of contemporary nature poetry. It is recommended for nature-writing courses as well as classes dealing with 20th-century poetry, contemporary literary criticism, and environmental theory.