The Poetry Book

About the Book

The Poetry Book is more than a collection of poems, it is instructive as to poetic technique and convention as well as types of poetry. In it there are no prose paragraphs that have been restructured into stanzas, or “mysteriously” configured and presented as poems with diction and subject little more interesting than closed garage doors in a tract home subdivision. There is free verse here, and traditional rhythm and rhyme, but it is all poetry. And it is poetry, not because the author wants it to be, but because of the poetic techniques and conventions he has employed. A stanza does not a poem make nor does bombastic delivery. If the traditions, rules of writing, and conventions of literary history are of no value to poetry, then there is no poetry.

About the Author

Curtis D. Vick is a Kentuckian by birth who moved to Arizona at age 17 while in the military. He has lived there ever since. He has a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Arizona State University. He retired from a thirty year teaching career in High School and Junior College and moved with his lovely wife, Dorinda, to the Prescott, Arizona, area to be near their three adult children and six grandchildren. Mr. Vick’s favorite traditional poem is “Crossing The Bar” by Tennyson. His favorite free verse poem is “In Just Spring” by E. E. Cummings. A novelist as well as a poet, Mr. Vick feels that poetry should “sing” and be reflective of poetic technique and convention, and that “if there is a question as to whether a piece of writing is poetry or prose, it is probably a piece of prose.