De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong

Neither Yeats nor Stevens, Dickinson, Auden or Shakespeare escapes Pulitzer-winner W.D. Snodgrass's often droll, (intentionally) paltry rewriting in De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Bad. In the classroom, Snodgrass (Heart's Needle) deploys the alternate-universe technique he demonstrates in this teacher's and poet's manual that is, he changes the specific words and syntax but retains the sense, meter and length of various poems and asks his students to compare the two versions. Cummings's ""anyone lived in a pretty how town"" (here ""A certain man lived in a very nice town""), Lowell's ""Skunk Hour"" (""Raccoon Time"") and Dickinson's ""I Never Lost As Much but Twice"" (simply ""I've Lost So Much"") each possesses a ""particular excellence"" that he attempts to ""dissolve or drive out,"" thereby laying bare the elements that make a poem great. (July)