After his mother, hurrying to her tuba lesson, tells him that a poem will cure his pet fish's boredom, a little boy tries to find out what a poem is by asking friends, neighbors, and other members of his family.

Do you like poems? Are you sure you know what one is?! Join popular poet Roger Stevens for a trip through the different types of poetry: from advertising jingles to football chants, and from free verse to rap. Then, why not have a go at writing a poem of your own?

This is a book which regards poetry as a meeting point and creator of overlapping communities of writers, readers, and audiences. While essays here look closely at individual poets in the lyric tradition, including Edward Thomas, Denise Riley, and Edwin Morgan, the author also elucidates the networks of energy and inspiration which poetry and the artist's book catalyse.

When the tide is out, the curtain is up on this clever tale of an underwater, watercolor ballet featuring dancing crabs and all of their aquatic friends from children’s book author and poet Renée LaTulippe and illustrator Cécile Metzger. “Beautiful, original, entertaining.”—Midwest Book Review Welcome. Enter. Sit right there. The Crab Ballet is about to begin! This spectacular seaside show, starring dancing crabs, an aquatic corps de ballet, and a cast of French ballet terms, is sure to delight ballet dancers of all stripes.

Animals introduce the wonder and magic of poetry.

Introduces the different kinds of poetry and the mechanics of writing poetry, providing an opportunity for the reader to experience the joy of making a poem.

Approaching poems as utterances designed and packaged for pleasurable reanimation, How to Play a Poem leads readers through a course that uses our common experience of language to bring poems to life. It mobilizes the speech genres we acquire in our everyday exchanges to identify “signs of life” in poetic texts that can guide our co-creation of tone. How to Play a Poem draws on ideas from the Bakhtin School, usually associated with fiction rather than poetry, to construct a user-friendly practice of close reading as an alternative to the New Critical formalism that still shapes much of teaching and alienates many readers. It sets aside stock questions about connotation and symbolism to guide the playing out of dynamic relations among the human parties to poetic utterances, as we would play a dramatic script or musical score. How to Play a Poem addresses critics ready to abandon New Criticism, teachers eager to rethink poetry, readers eager to enjoy it, and students willing to give it a chance, inviting them to discover a lively and enlivening way to animate familiar and unfamiliar poems.