Wingbeats II: Exercises and Practice in Poetry

Scott Wiggerman · David Meischen

Jan 2016 · Dos Gatos Press

About this ebook

WINGBEATS II: EXERCISES & PRACTICE IN POETRY, the eagerly awaited follow-up to the original WINGBEATS, is an exciting collection from teaching poets—58 poets, 59 exercises. Whether you want a quick exercise to jump-start the words or multi-layered approaches that will take you deeper into poetry, WINGBEATS II is for you. The exercises include clear step-by-step instruction and numerous example poems, including work by Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Cleopatra Mathis, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Patricia Smith, William Carlos Williams, and others. You will find exercises for collaborative writing, for bending narrative into new poetic shapes, for experimenting with persona, for writing nonlinear poems. For those interested in traditional elements, WINGBEATS II includes exercises on the sonnet, as well as approaches to meter, line breaks, syllabics, and more. Like its predecessor, WINGBEATS II will be a standard in creative writing classes, a standard go-to in every poet's library.

About the author

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf & Beak: Sonnets (Purple Flag, 2015), Presence (Pecan Grove Press, 2011) and Vegetables and Other Relationships (Plain View Press, 2000). Recent publications with poems by Wiggerman include Switched-on Gutenberg, BorderSenses, Poemeleon, Broad River Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Southwestern American Literature. Wiggerman has edited several anthologies and books, including Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair and Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga. A frequent workshop instructor, he is lead editor of Dos Gatos Press, publisher of the annual Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its nineteenth year. David Meischen has been writing poetry and teaching the writing of poetry for twenty-five years. He was the Master Teacher in English for UTeach-Liberal Arts, the teacher preparation program in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas, Austin, 2002-2006. He has had poems in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and other journals, as well as Two Southwests (Virtual Artists Collective, 2008), which features poets from the southwest of China and the United States. Meischen is a co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press.