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Writing Exercises | How to Critique a Poem | APW Interactive Forums



Reading List

We begin the winter 1997 semester of The Albany Poetry Workshop with the following texts:

To find these books, you are likely to locate a reliable used edition of the Morrow anthology on your local independent bookseller's shelves, since it was a popular item when it first appeared in 1985, or you may order it new from an independent bookseller for $17.95, in paper.

You are not likely to find Ken White's How to Publish Your Poetry in a bookstore, however, as White's book is currently under consideration with a publisher and will not likely appear until next year. The author is currently offering the book directly, and you will find details here for ordering his book in the future. APW has had the good fortune to have received a review copy of Ken White's book and has been granted permission to reprint selected passages on these pages in the upcoming weeks.

We are using the Morrow anthology because it contains a cross-section of noteworthy American poets publishing in the last decade. The poems are fresh and speak of the American experience. Beginning poetry students will discover poems in which the authors use a natural speaking voice, and students will find these works useful as models. Advanced poets will find this a helpful resource, since it contains writing on a variety of subjects which invite them to exceed their own boundaries.

We'll use Ken White's How to Publish Your Poetry, as a guide to publishing our poems in small press magazines. We begin this semester in APW by requesting review copies of small litmags, examining them, and then submitting our poems to selected magazines whose pages contain poems similar to our own. White's book contains useful guidelines for beginners as well as for advanced poets; there are submissions strategies, a standard submission format, and guides to those ever-tricky simultaneous submissions. White's practical and informative index includes entries of many magazines, arranged from beginning-level magazines to advanced-level magazines, and the index entries include title, address, sample copy price, report time, whether the editors comment on the submissions, and a brief paragraph for each entry outlining the editors' preferences.

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Writing Exercises

 Poem for the End of the Century

In the APW, as we look inward to our lives for material for our writing, we also look outward to history and society -- to those events which link personal experience with our culture and which may give us a hint of what our culture may promise in the future.

Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz has given us an example. On his home page, we find his poem entitled Poem for the End of the Century.

Please take a moment now to download both the audio and written versions of the poem, print the text, and read along as you listen to the audio file. Please return here afterward for a brief discussion of the poem and a writing exercise.


Now that you have familiarized yourself with Milosz's poem, here are a few observations on getting you started with this writing assignment.

In "Poem for the End of the Century," the speaker grapples with "the notion of sin" in the first stanza, observing a time when "everything was fine and the notion of sin had vanished." In the second stanza, and for unknown reasons, he still searches for an answer. He is tortured by the question, sleepless and ashamed to speak of it aloud, and he believes that to do so, in the third stanza, would "seem an outrage against the health of mankind."

In stanza four, the speaker stands alone with his own memories of the notion of sin, saying that "each has its own pain." As he looks backward into history and to the sufferings he has seen across time, he also looks forward, standing at the edge of this century.

In the next stanza, the speaker wonders about the apparent innocence which he sees on the beaches and in the "impeccable sky." The tale of the saintly Arab in the next stanza reveals both God's malice, and mankind's doubt in God. The saintly Arab, were he to reveal God's mercy to the people, tells God that people "would not care for" God if they knew of his mercy.

Since the speaker seems unable to abolish the cause and effect of "that affair of pain and guilt" in the world, he has no one left to whom he can turn for solace, not even the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Christ had consented to allow "all that is," and the speaker of the poem must accept it.

In the final stanza, the speaker accepts the "jubilation" and "harvests," as well as the world's suffering, knowing that in the end, "not everyone is granted serenity."

Here is a striking poem asking larger questions about the nature of our suffering and our sin. This poem deals with questions of public and private sin and it asks these questions at the end of the century (and millennium) in a personal and humble fashion.

Writing Assignment

Write your own poem for the end of the century.

Pick a subject that you are closely familiar with, and consider it in its historical perspective. Milosz has chosen the notion of sin as his focus, but you may choose some other focus. For example, if you are a mother, speak about child-rearing at the end of the century. If you join segments of steel together in your daily work, talk about welding. Consider your position as a poet writing at the end of this century and into the next.

Write your poem with the humble and understated tone in Milosz's poem for the end of the century, and employ plain, everyday language that mixes a variety of concrete and abstract images.

Submit your poem to these pages, and we'll post and critique the poems as they arrive.

Thank you for looking in on us then!


New Writing Exercise (May 1997)

Improbable Tales
by Janet Holmes

Many of the first poems were ballads -- narrative songs with refrains -- and, frankly, some of them were pretty grisly, replete with murders, ghosts, you name it, but the stories were good enough that they've been passed down for centuries. Probably the closest we could come to the improbable stories found in the old ballads are the stories in today's more sensational tabloids. Your assignment is to choose a truly improbable tale (aliens? Sasquatch? dogs that foresee the future?) from a tabloid and render it in traditional ballad form--so future generations will know what ours considered newsworthy.

What's ballad form? Remember these things:


Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Lines 1 and 3 have four iambic "feet," and the other lines have three feet. (This stanza is often called a "hymn stanza" because so many hymns were composed in its meter. If you can sing your ballad to "Amazing Grace" -- or to "The Yellow Rose of Texas" -- you've got it.)

Finally, the whole thing must tell a story. Have fun with it!

Submit your poem to these pages, and we'll post and critique them as they arrive.

Thank you for looking in on us then!


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How to Critique a Poem

To help you offer constructive comments and criticisms to the authors on the APW pages,here are a few suggestions for you to consider in preparing your remarks.


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Poetry Critiques
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