The subtitle of Poemcrazy (“Freeing Your Life with Words”) is an excellent way to describe the main message in these pages.
Fun. Random. Surprising. Inspirational. These are just a few of the words I’d use if I had to describe this book to someone.
Less than a year after the paperback edition of Poemcrazy was published (in 1997), I had the chance to attend a poetry workshop that the author — Susan Wooldridge — held at a local university.
At the end of each chapter in the book, the author suggests several ways to practice methods for helping you get started writing poems of your own.
Very different from Poemcrazy, The Discovery of Poetry was actually written as a textbook — by a professor who taught creative writing at San Francisco State University for several years, during which time she published 6 volumes of poetry.
Frances Mayes says she wrote The Discovery of Poetry as a “Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems” … to help students learn to appreciate the genre she loves so much.
Mayes said it wasn’t until she bought a villa in Tuscany, Italy — which eventually became her second home — that she began writing prose instead of poems.
(Her book Under the Tuscan Sun, published in 1996, became a best-seller and was eventually turned into a movie in 2003.)
“Poetic prose” is one way Mayes’ memoirs and novels have been described. (I got hooked on her writing after reading her memoir Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir — about her unusual upbringing in a small town in southern Georgia.)
In the introduction (“Invitation”) to The Discovery of Poetry, Mayes says she always told students that “poetry is excellent practice for the mind because it is THE language art. Learning to see precisely how words work pulls you closer to what you want to write — whether it’s a newspaper article, a cost estimate, a letter home, or a novel.”
