The Poetry Book

The Poetry Book is more than a collection of poems, it is instructive as to poetic technique and convention as well as types of poetry. In it there are no prose paragraphs that have been restructured into stanzas, or “mysteriously” configured and presented as poems with diction and subject little more interesting than closed garage doors in a tract home subdivision. There is free verse here, and traditional rhythm and rhyme, but it is all poetry. And it is poetry, not because the author wants it to be, but because of the poetic techniques and conventions he has employed. A stanza does not a poem make nor does bombastic delivery. If the traditions, rules of writing, and conventions of literary history are of no value to poetry, then there is no poetry.