The Portable Poetry Workshop; my chapter and others'

I have a chapter in this new creative writing volume, 'Taking Form: Experimental and Avant Garde Forms', where I try to squeeze in Language Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Language Poetry (particularly 'writing through' and 'poet's prose') and Conceptual Writing. It is the result of handouts and explanations I have given to my third year Poetry and Innovative Form class over some years. It's quite contentious (one section is entitled 'What Was Free Verse?'

It is also a practical take on the attitude to form I develop in my book The Meaning of Form (see here), a transpostion of its thesis of which I am proud.

One class handout is referred to in my bibliography to my contribution, and I provide a link to this beefed up list of experiments (I was summarising the kinds of stuff in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing  ed. Dworkin, C, and Goldsmith, K., Evanston: Northwestern Uni, 2011.) here. I wonder if more people will access it. (Fewer have looked at it so fa than my purely academic takes on CP.) 

See here for details of the book. My thanks to the generous editor Nigel McLoughlin (one of my ex-colleagues on the HE Committee of NAWE).

I recommend it, since there is a balance between, for example, expected accounts of the sonnet and a surprising and welcome chapter on Muriel Rukeyser.

The full contents are:

Introduction

SECTION I: FORM AND STRUCTURE

1. Varieties of The Sonnet; Nigel McLoughlin
2. Terza Rima; Martin Figura
3. The Villanelle; Siobhan Campbell
4. The Ballad; Paul Hardwick
5. Sestinas; Barbara Smith
6. The Ode; Tony Williams
7. Modern Syllabics; Claire Crowther
8. Blank Verse; Ros Barber
9. Vers Libre/Free Verse; Todd Swift
10. The Prose Poem; Carrie Etter
11. Taking Form: Experimental and Avant Garde Forms; Robert Sheppard
12. Spatial Form; Mario Petrucci

SECTION II: TROPE AND DEVICE

13. Prosody; J. T. Welsch
14. Rhyme; Angela Topping
15. Simile; Andrea Holland
16. Metaphor; Nigel McLoughlin
17. How to Make a Woman Disappear: Extended Metaphor in 'Waiting for Bluebeard'; Helen Ivory
18. Irony is for Losers; Kevin Higgins
19. Dramatic Monologue; Barbara Smith
20. Humour in Poetry; Todd Swift
21. Imagery; Ashley Lister
22. Persona; Angela France
23. Voice; Andrea Holland
24. The Singing Within; Ann Drysdale

SECTION III: POETICS AND PRACTICE

25. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Sprung Rhythm, Inscape & Instress; Nigel McLoughlin
26. Towards a Reading of 'The Mountain' by Robert Frost; Siobhan Campbell
27. Amy Lowell: Common Sense Readings; Ashley Lister
28. Eliot and Pound: The Better Makers; Todd Swift
29. The Meaning of Meaning: William Empson; Claire Crowther
30. Gertrude Stein: Poetry and Grammar; J. T. Welsch
31. Charles Olson's Projective Verse: The Breath and the Line; Kate North
32. Frank O'Hara: Personism; Barbara Smith
33. William Carlos Williams: Music and Machines; Susan Millar DuMars
34. Maurice Scully and the Avant Garde; Paul Perry
35. When is a Riddle not a Riddle?; Helen Ivory
36. Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Role of Poetry; Claire Crowther