Summary:
"Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach" is a comprehensive alternative to the full-class workshop approach to poetry writing instruction. In the five-canon approach, peer critique of student poems takes place in online environments, freeing up class time for writing exercises and lessons based on the five canons of classical rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Review:
The value in Hunley's text is that it provides a unique entry point for discussion and debate on the potential links among pedagogy, practice and poetry as research in creative writing at the post-secondary level. Hunley's work adds to the debate on 'teaching writing' with practical strategies and methods that potentially enhance both the pedagogy of the creative writing workshop and the role of the writer-instructor within that setting.
Veronica Gaylie, Teachers College Record, January 02, 2008 Tom Hunley's Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach is not only thorough and intelligent but also a pleasure to read. Hunley uses classical rhetoric as his starting point, but the book, which contains insightful discussions of online conferencing and poetry slams, is hardly mired in the past. Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach demands the very best from both instructors and students, but isn't that we should have been expecting all along?
David Starkey, co-author (with Wendy Bishop) of Keywords in Creative Writing For its thoroughness, its clear and vigorous prose, its engaging wit, and groundbreaking recommendations, I would recommend this book and the approach it advocates to any teacher of creative writing at any level, undergraduate or graduate.
Alan Shapiro, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the author of "In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination"
Author Biography:
Tom C. Hunley is an assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University and the director of Steel Toe Books (www.steeltoebooks.com). He received degrees from University of Washington (BA), Eastern Washington University (MFA), and Florida State University (Ph.D.). He has published hundreds of poems in literary journals such as TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Rattle, Connecticut Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Cimarron Review. His books of poetry include The Tongue (Wind Publications 2004); Still, There's a Glimmer (WordTech Editions 2004); and My Life as a Minor Character (Pecan Grove Press 2005).
Readership Level:
Postgraduate, Research/Professional, Undergraduate
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