The Gift of Form: A Pocket Guide to Formal Poetry - Paperback

by John Brantingham (Author)

Often poets feel stifled by the structure of formal poetry, but John Brantingham's instructions discuss how the tools of the form can help writers to create work they never would have expected when they approach formal poetry from a completely new direction. These forms can give us ideas that we never knew we could have. They allow for new insights not possible with free verse alone. These ideas and insights are the gift that form gives us.

Author Biography

John Brantingham is a poet and author of literary fiction from Southern California. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor's daily show, Writer's Almanac, and he has had more than 100 poems and stories published in the United States and England in magazines such as The Journal, Confrontation, Mobius, and Tears in the Fence. His books include The Green of Sunset, Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods, and East of Los Angeles. He is a professor at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, teaches classes at Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and leads free camping and writing workshops at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. He is the writer-in-residence at the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona and the president of the San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, a non-profit that brings free classes and readings to the San Gabriel Valley. He is one of the fiction editors of The Chiron Review, a nationally distributed literary magazine, and he and his wife Annie live happily east of Los Angeles.