An introduction to poetry makes use of prisoner's work songs, Broadway show tunes, and the cries of street vendors to introduce readers to the rhythms of poetry.

"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer’s book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject. This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing so Fairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.

Celebrate 100 years of Langston Hughes's powerful poetry. A Coretta Scott King Honor Award recipient, Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes includes 26 of the poet's most influential pieces, including: "Mother to Son"; "My People"; "Words Like Freedom"; "I, Too"; and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"--Hughes's first published piece, which was originally released in June 1921. This collection is curated and annotated by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, two leading poetry experts. It also features gallery-quality art by Benny Andrews and a new foreword by Renée Watson, a Newbery Honor Award recipient and founder of the I, Too Arts Collective.

A Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Bard meets the Backstreet Boys in this collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets This hilarious book of poetry transforms disco staples, classic rock anthems, and recent chart-toppers into hilarious iambic pentameter! All your favorite songs are here, including hits by Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, and many others. An entertaining journey into the world of Elizabethan poetry, and based on the immensely popular Tumblr of the same name, Pop Sonnets is the perfect gift for Shakespeare fans and music lovers alike. “Ever wonder what Taylor Swift and Beyoncé would sound like in iambic pentameter? We hadn’t either, but now we can't get enough.” —TIME

Describes the different resources that can be used to teach high school students about poetry.

For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature.