Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets(Excelsior Editions)

Contemporary poets offer behind-the-scenes perspectives on the poetic process. This diverse collection of poems and companion essays by forty nationally and internationally known poets allows readers to experience the creative process through the eyes and voice of each poet. No matter how often we are told that revision is an essential component of poetic composition, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to think of the poem as having sprung spontaneously, Athena-like, from the writer's head. By exposing readers to the finished product as well as the poet's own account of the poem's creation, Making Poems offers a behind-the-scenes perspective on the poetic process that will fascinate both beginning and established writers. The book also affords poetry instructors an opportunity to demonstrate to their students the ways in which poems can originate from seemingly mundane and unlikely sources.

Table of Contents:
Learning to Make Poems-An Introduction Red Sugar Finding Red Sugar Jan Beatty Man of the Year Strange Tercets: Merry Men, Iambic Feet, and Poetic Transgression Robin Becker Knot Tying Lessons: The Slip Knot The Knot of the Poem Fleda Brown Brother Andre's Heart: Montreal, 2003 Tenebrae: Living In/Among Shadows J. L. Conrad Factory Jungle OK for Shipment Jim Daniels Loving the Flesh The Body of Poetry Todd Davis Elegy with Fall's Last Filaments On "Elegy with Fall's Last Filaments" Chris Dombrowski To W. S. Merwin Translating My Way into a Poem Dan Gerber Contemplation with Ledges and Moon Writing into the Evening Jeff Gundy Pink On "Pink" Kimiko Hahn Longhouse From the Out-There William Heyen Awash with blushing textures, your hips, lipped lilies There Is No Avoiding H. L. Hix Dance Shut Up & Dance John Hoppenthaler Sonnets for the Amish Girls of Nickel Mines Every Buggy Has Four Wheels: Making "Sonnets for the Amish Girls of Nickel Mines" Ann Hostetler Double the Digits Memory and the Problem of What Really Happened Julia Spicher Kasdorf Borges at the Northside Rotary The Deliberate Transformed by the Accidental David Kirby Clown Baby's Summer The Natural Birth of Clown Baby, or How I Came to Midwife, Father, and Wet-nurse a Prose Poem Sequence The Conception of Clown Baby Gerry LaFemina Up Late with Loons Making Peace Mary Linton Penelope The Biography of a Poem Shara McCallum Revelation The Poem Stripped Bare by Her Author Dinty W. Moore Covetous Coveting Thy Neighbor's Poem Mary Rose O'Reilley The Third Winter The Wild Horse Erin Murphy Anniversary Anything Worthwhile Lee Peterson Orpheus, Gathering the Trees In the Woodlot Greg Rappleye Sunday An Essay with Two Short Lectures: Revising "Sunday" Keith Ratzlaff Repairing the Hous The Poem and I Have a Little Conversation Jack Ridl Coming Out of Caliban Are You Watching? Steven Sherrill Revising My Memoirs Cutting Logic Loose from Its Tethers David Shumate Christopher Street Pier (Summer) Against Solitude Aaron Smith Blood On "Blood" Lucien Stryk Hot Pads, Cold Pads On the Writing of "Hot Pads, Cold Pads" Mary Swander Fishing on the Merrimack, My Father Sees a B-24 Prisoner of War From Sunday Supplement to Sonnet Sequence: A Poet's Gift to Herself Sue Ellen Thompson Myth Mythmaking Natasha Trethewey At the Farmer's Market in Eugene In a Country at War Brian Turner The Weak Already Inherited Response Lee Upton Anniversary Revisiting the Anniversary: A Ghost Story G. C. Waldrep Beloved The Eccentric Discipline Michael Waters Wesley Leaving Leaving to Find Place in the Making of a Poem Patricia Jabbeh How Flatterers Must Be Shunned The Prince's Almond Trees: "How Flatterers Must Be Shunned" Katharine Whitcomb A Lock of Her Hair The Charm by Which I Meant to Bring Her Back Robert Wrigley Contributor's Notes Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Todd F. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Penn State at Altoona. He is coauthor (with Kenneth Womack) of Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory and coeditor (with Womack) of Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (also published by SUNY Press), Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, and The Critical Response to John Irving. He is also the author of a book of poetry, Ripe.