Crafting Poems demystifies the genre through diverse examples, clear instruction, and emphases on practice, enjoyment, and developing a distinct voice. By connecting reading with writing and balancing discipline with self-expression and improvisation, Crafting Poems gives aspiring poets a flexible and powerful toolbox with which to build their work.
Comments
“The intelligence that distinguishes Ethel Rackin’s own poetry manifests in the eclectic selections, clear explanations, and accessible exercises filling Crafting Poems. In a friendly, conversational tone, Crafting Poems frankly addresses the vulnerability of writing (and reading) poetry and the courage it takes to commit to the work while offering valuable wisdom and cheering on developing poets to take the leap. After decades of photocopying poems from dozens of sources to provide students with a genuine range of formal and experimental, traditional and contemporary verse, I’ve found everything I need to teach poetry in one wondrous volume.” — Elizabeth Savage, Fairmont State University
Introduction to Creative Writing: A Great Adventure
Introduction
Basic Elements and Enduring Mysteries
1. Getting Started
The Crafting of a Poem
- Charles Simic, “The World”
- John Clare, “I Am!”
- Laura Riding Jackson, “Postponement of Self”
- Evie Shockley, “canvas and mirror”
2. Images
The Truth Is in the Details
- William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”
- Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
- Louise Glück, “Yellow Dahlia”
- Carly Ceo, “Ship She”
- Haryette Mullen, “Sleeping with the Dictionary”
- James Wright, “A Blessing”
- George Oppen, “Solution”
- Jan Beatty, “Blue Dress”
- Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun”
- Robert Frost, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy”
- William Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
3. Sound and Rhythm
Some Enchanted Music
- W.S. Merwin, “Late Spring”
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters”
- Danez Smith, “The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar”
- Donald Revell, “Car Radio”
- Mother Goose, “Hush little baby”
- Walt Whitman, Excerpts from Song of Myself
- Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
- Alice Notley, “I the People”
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
- e.e. cummings, 67: “when faces called flowers float out of the ground”
- David Trinidad, “Slicker”
- Joy Harjo, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”
- John Ashbery, “Street Musicians”
4. Traditional Form
Rules Are Made to Be Broken
- Sina Queyras, “The Couriers”
- Anne Marie Macari, “From the Plane”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, “Six Quatrains”
- Etheridge Knight, “Haiku”
- William Blake, “The Tyger”
- William Shakespeare, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
- Sandra Simonds, “Red Wand”
- Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
- Sandra Beasley, “Let Me Count the Waves”
- Dean Rader, “Cartography; or American Allegory I”
- A.E. Stallings, “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs”
- Adelaide Crapsey, “Amaze”
- Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, “Ode to Tomatoes”
- Robert Hass, “Selected Haiku by Issa”
- Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
- Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”
- Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”
- John Yau, “Overnight”
- Kevin Young, “Ode to the Hotel Near the Children’s Hospital”
5. Free Verse
Without a Net
- Solmaz Sharif, “Ground Visibility”
- Ocean Vuong, “Aubade with Burning City”
- Brenda Hillman, “Describing Tattoos to a Cop”
- George Herbert, “Easter Wings”
- Marilyn Nelson, “Fingers Remembered”
- Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
- Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse, “Ruts”
- Mary Ruefle, “Recollections of My Christmas Tree”
- C.D. Wright, “Flame”
- Gerald Stern, “Galaxy Love”
6. Theme
What’s My Poem About?
- Anne Sexton, “In Celebration of My Uterus”
- Elizabeth Bachinsky, “Wolf Lake”
- Stephanie Brown, “Feminine Intuition”
- Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Citizen: An American Lyric
- Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
- Lynn Melnick, “Twelve”
- Alessandra Lynch, “Admission”
- James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
7. Voice and Tone
Dear Reader
- Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
- Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons”
- James Tate, “Distance From Loved Ones”
- Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
- Tyehimba Jess, “Sissieretta Jones”
- Amy Gerstler, “Advice From a Caterpillar”
- Christopher Bursk, “Letter to a Great-great-grandson”
- Lorna Crozier, “Onions”
- C.D. Wright, “Clockmaker with Bad Eyes”
- Susan Stewart, “Lessons From Television”
8. Revision
First Thought, Best Thought?
- Kaden Unger, “Enigma”
- Ethel Rackin, “Song”
Appendices
Appendix A: Workshopping
Appendix B: Writing Resources
Ethel Rackin Professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College, has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years. She is the author of the poetry collections The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013), Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), Evening (Furniture Press, 2017), and In Time (Word Works Books, 2025). Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and many other journals.
