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Tables of Contents for Metro
Chapter/Section Title
Page #
Page Count
Alternate Contents
ix
Genre
Introduction With Mainly Teachers in Mind
xix
Introduction With Mainly Students in Mind
xxiv
Prologue Concerning Writing Exercises and Ways to Approach Them
xxvii
PART I WRITING PROMPTS AND ACTIVITIES
1
278
Riding the Blue Line---Reading
3
41
Getting Started
3
1
Of Reading
3
1
Fitting Yourself into the Conversation of Writing You Love
4
2
Reading Yourself
6
1
And How About Your Reading Habits?
6
1
Your Own Canon
7
2
Reading Your Times: When You Came to Be
9
1
Reading Home: Organizing and Developing Memories
10
2
Correspondences: Imitation and Inspiration
12
1
Collecting Epigraphs for a Textual Mosaic
12
1
Writing Provocations: Responding to Other Writing
13
5
Eight Steps for Inhabiting and Transforming a Poem
18
5
Travels With the Essay
23
3
Reading and Writing Out of Other Art
26
1
History as a Collaboration of Fact and Imagination
27
3
Shadows, Doubles, and Others
30
2
Can You Name That Epiphany?
32
3
The Narrow Road to Mixing Genres
35
1
Reading Form as a Product of Perspective
36
3
Reading and Writing in the Workshop
39
1
Responding to, Evaluating, and Grading Alternative Style
39
5
Riding the Green Line---Invention
44
74
Getting Started
44
1
Dislodge the Icon of ``The Writer''
44
4
Narrative Anxiety Cure-All (Not Sold In Stores)
48
3
Coming to Our Overlooked Senses
51
1
Taste: Writing About Food and Family
51
5
Sounds and Smells
56
1
Places and Things
57
1
The Familiar Place As Frontier: Seeing the Rare in the Ordinary
57
1
Beginning With Nostalgia: Lost Childhood Places
58
2
Places, Memories, and Desires
60
2
The Text(ure) of Public Places
62
2
Writing About or With Objects
64
3
Writing from Expertise, Not Just from Experience
67
3
Language and Form
70
1
The Power of Names
70
3
Writing from Your Name: An Introductory Poem (an Acrostic)
73
4
First Words of Stories: This Sentence, These Words
77
5
The Perfect Grammar of Form: Finding Your Own Ideal Form
82
3
Nonsense and Sound Poems: Demystifying Formal Verse
85
2
Burrowing: Writing That Springs from Language Itself
87
2
There's Something About a Sonnet: Easing Into a 10 x 14 Poem
89
4
Piecemeal Fictions
93
2
Comparison vs. Contiguity: Using Metaphor and Metonymy
95
2
Working with Metaphor
97
1
Premises, Assumptions, Hypothetical Situations
98
1
Y in X-land: Dropping Characters into Places They Don't Belong
98
1
Under What Circumstances Would Someone ... ?
99
1
Against the Grain: Ignoring Conventional Wisdom
100
2
Against the Grain, Part Two
102
2
The Nonexistent Relative: Viewing ``Facts'' as Malleable
104
1
Ambiguity Is Certainly Useful
104
2
Drama = Conflict = Power
106
3
Story Spinning: 51 Prompts for Story Ideas
109
2
Memory
111
1
Listing and Memory
111
2
The Most Important Spectator in Your Writing Life---You
113
2
How New Writing Grows Out of Old
115
3
Riding the Orange Line---Development and Improvisation
118
47
Time
118
1
Playing With Time: Some Basic Moves
118
3
Telling Time 1: Order
121
2
Telling Time 2: Frequency
123
1
Telling Time 3: Duration
124
4
Telling Time: Down and Dirty
128
1
Developing Characters, Points of View, and Other Elements
129
1
Character Witness: 20 Questions
129
4
Building Character
133
2
Pardon Me, Your Nemesis Is Showing
135
2
Turning the Lens: Framing Narrative Perspective
137
2
Narrative ``Voice'' and Listeners Within Stories
139
2
Using Delay As an Organizing Principle
141
2
Writing What Cannot Be Filmed
143
2
A Certain Conventional Element
145
2
Deconstructing and Reconstructing
147
1
Things Are One Way, Then They Are the Other
147
3
Fiction Backwards and Forwards: Interlocking Narratives, Prequels, and Sequels
150
2
When Losing Control Is About Finding It Again
152
4
More Work with Language Itself
156
1
The Fat Draft and the Memory Draft: When Energy Runs Out
156
3
Thinking Poetically to Develop and Improvise
159
3
Word-Surfing Safari: Playing with Language
162
3
Riding the Red Line---Revision and Editing
165
29
Strategies: Different Approaches to Revising and Editing
165
1
The Executive Summary: How to Respond to Workshop Criticism
165
2
The Voices of Revision: What to Do with Advice
167
2
Radical Revision: A Strategy of Risk
169
2
Sentence Sounds: Exploring the ``Conjunctive'' and ``Disjunctive''
171
2
Getting Unstuck: Slowing Down to Pay Attention
173
4
Quickness as Complementary to Complexity
177
1
Forms Within Formlessness: Seeing the Potential Shapes of a Poem
178
3
Old Faithfuls: Some Enduring Approaches to Revision
181
1
Tactics: Specific Tasks of Revision and Editing
182
1
The Arbitrary Reviser Looks at Fiction
182
2
Paper, Tape, Scissors: The Arbitrary Reviser Acquires Tools
184
1
Directed Revision and Editing: Variations on Arbitrary Revision
185
2
Writing Between the Lines: Revising as ``Adding To'' Not ``Taking Away''
187
2
``Blowing Up'' Your Poems: Large-Font Revision
189
1
Revising Openers in Prose Genres: Eight Options
190
4
Union Station---Alternative Guided-Writing Scenarios
194
44
Multiauthored Texts
194
1
Coauthoring---Some Whys and Wherefores
194
6
Dream Wandering: Writing with a Group
200
2
Public Poetry
202
1
Video Poem: Let Each Medium Teach the Other
203
2
Experimental Forms and Less Familiar Modes
205
1
Writing from Your Autobiography Box
205
3
Parodies---Pushing Imitation to the Edge
208
4
Palimpsest: Writing ``Over'' the Forbidden Story
212
2
The Possibility of Play and the Play of Possibilities: Trying Writing Games
214
2
Multimedia, Cross-Cultural Writing
216
2
The Virtual Hypertext Game
218
3
Fortuitous Textual Coincidences; or When Fragments Collide
221
4
What the Words Grow Out Of: Building Multidimensional Collages
225
2
Flooding Yourself: A Strategy to Gather, Freewrite, Assemble, Construct
227
1
Vantage Points on Language
228
1
The Center Holds: Weaving Multiple Discourses in a Single Text
228
2
Warp and Weft: More on Weaving
230
2
What Hands Make: Using ``Instructions'' as a Model for Other Writing
232
2
In the Same Breath: Rewriting as Part of the Conversation
234
1
Silence
235
3
Exact Fare---Guided Writing Related to Selected Matters of Grammar, Precision, Style, and Punctuation
238
41
Behold the Sentence
238
1
The Care and Feeding of Sentences
238
3
Sentence as Style
241
4
What's in a Sentence: The Possibilities Exposed by Breaking the Rules
245
2
Building-Block Stories: Practice Mixing Sentence Styles
247
3
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Writing Using Only Question Sentences
250
2
Dueling Banjoes: The Use of Parallelism
252
1
Sentence Economics
253
3
Grammar, Punctuation, and Creativity
256
1
Grammar-Check Your Favorite Author
256
2
This Adventitious Music: Exploring Grammar with Nonsense Writing
258
1
By All Devious Means (But With Grammatical Consistency)
259
2
The Problem (Okay, One Problem) With Punctuation
261
4
In Praise of Punctuation
265
1
Word-Choice in Particular, Language-Awareness in General
265
1
Words: Choice and Precision
265
3
Figures of Speech
268
3
The Opposites of Everything
271
2
Poetry Phobia Cure-All (Not Sold in Stores)
273
2
Scavenger Hunt
275
4
PART II MINI-ANTHOLOGY
279
131
``Learning to Write'' (poem)
281
1
Audre Lorde
``Elektra on Third Avenue'' (poem)
282
1
Marilyn Hacker
``Mourning the Dying American Female Names'' (poem)
283
1
Hunt Hawkins
``Harlem'' (poem)
284
1
Langston Hughes
#712 (``Because I could not stop for Death---'') (poem)
285
1
Emily Dickinson
``Ode on a Gregian Urn'' (poem)
286
2
John Keats
``Where We Live Now'' (poem)
288
1
Marilyn Chin
``(Untitled)'' (poem)
289
1
Peter Meinke
``Arte Poetica'' (poem)
290
1
Pablo Neruda
``The Art of Poetry'' translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly (poem)
291
1
Pablo Neruda
``Of Reading'' (poem)
292
1
Hans Ostrom
``Metaphors'' (poem)
293
1
Sylvia Plath
Anonymous, [Early English riddle] (poem)
294
1
``Drug Store'' (poem)
295
1
Karl Shapiro
excerpt from Black Mercury translated from the Swedish by Hans Ostrom (poem)
296
1
Marie Silkeberg
``The Children'' (poem)
297
1
William Carlos Williams
``Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey'' (poem)
298
4
William Wordsworth
``Musee des Beaux Arts'' (poem)
302
1
W. H. Auden
``Horoscope Imperatives: A `Found' Ghazal'' (poem)
303
1
Wendy Bishop
Anonymous, ``Go Down, Moses'' (song lyric)
304
1
Five Sonnets:
``My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun''
305
1
William Shakespeare
``Design''
306
1
Robert Frost
``My Daughter Considers Her Body''
307
1
Floyd Skloot
``Sonnet''
308
1
Robert Pinsky
``The Windhover''
309
1
Gerard Manley Hopkins
``In Praise of the Humble Comma'' (essay)
310
2
Pico Iyer
``Meander'' (essay/creative nonfiction)
312
2
Mary Paumier Jones
``Primary Sources'' (essay)
314
6
Rick Moody
``Anomalies in Relief: Notes of a California Expatriate'' (essay)
320
7
Hans Ostrom
``Library Card'' (essay)
327
7
Richard Wright
``My Children Explain the Big Issues'' (essay)
334
2
Will Baker
``Consanguinity'' (essay/creative nonfiction)
336
6
Jill Carpenter
``Landscape and Dream'' (short story)
342
4
Nancy Krusoe
``A Questionnaire for Rudolph Gordon'' (short story)
346
4
Jack Matthews
``How To Tell a True War Story'' (short story)
350
10
Tim O'Brien
``Street Map'' and ``RE/Collection'' (memoir)
360
7
Sheila Ortiz-Taylor
``A Conversation With My Father'' (short story)
367
4
Grace Paley
``Paris in `73'' (short story)
371
5
Grant Cogswell
``Arrow Math'' (short story)
376
15
Katharine Haake
excerpt from ``Hamlet'' (drama)
391
5
William Shakespeare
``A Really Big Shoe'' (performance piece)
396
14
Diana Marre
Suggested Reading
410
3
Reference Books
410
1
Anthologies
410
1
Criticism and Theory
411
1
Books on Writing
412
1
Publishing
412
1
Glossary
413
15
Acknowledgments
428
2
Index
430