[Tom Jardine]

The other resource any poet with a serious and long-term commitment to writing needs (or at least needs ready access to) is the Oxford English Dictionary. The full edition is, of course, available on a searchable CD.

--Clive Watkins

I fully agree. My full edition is my favorite object. It is the full spectrum of the media. Words are consciousness. You can't think without words. Try it. (You can build something, dance, paint, play music, or other such stuff without words, but words soon become necessary somehow.)

TJ

[Richard Wakefield]

I have many books listing rhetorical tropes and other literary terms, but what I'd really like is a reverse dictionary of them. I can't quite imagine how it would be laid out. The trouble is, I'm only rarely out to find the meaning of, say, "chiasmus" or "hesteron proteron," but I frequently stumble across some little nuance or trick and want to find out what it's called, its history, other examples.
I know, I know, such a thing is traditionally called a "professor." Unfortunately, I am one and hence need a prop to help me maintain the facade more effectively.
Anybody ever seen such a device?
RPW

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Richard

Michael Cantor wrote above:


I'm surprised that nobody mentioned a thesaurus or a rhyming dictionary.
I have a contemporary Webster's New World Rhyming Dictionary which I use regularly, but my real secret weapon is a dog-eared copy of Walker's Rhyming Dictionary, which was printed in England in, I think, the twenties or thirties (it is undated) and I purchased second hand at the old Strand in Manahattan in the fifties. It describes itself as a Dictionary..."..in which the whole language is arranged according to its terminations". Basically it is a backwards dictionary (I don't think these exist any more) in which words are in reverse alphabetical order, and while it is a pain-in-the-ass to use - you have to think of all the possible word endings that could fit your rhyme on your own - the volume of words it contains dwarfs any other rhyming dictionary I have seen, and it is a great source of ideas.

Try www.alibris.com They can locate many out-of-print, used or rare books. I find a lot of rare collector books through them.

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Richard

I just did a search at Alibris, and they have a dozen of the Walkers, from $7 to around $90, depending on the listed condition. They're trustworthy, with their own quality control checks.

Correction: they have eleven. I just bought one.

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited November 21, 2003).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Although I have a couple of rhyming dictionaries, that one sounds like a good investment. The "dictionary" I had in mind, though, isn't for finding rhymes, but for finding the names of various tropes that one comes across but can't identify. For example, say you come across "I gave her the ring and she gave me the finger": the book somehow helps you identify the trope as an example of syllepsis, and then gives you an explanation and further examples. It would be sort of a "Wildflowers of the Western United States," but for rhetorical tropes. As I say, I don't have a clue to how it could be arranged. A big table or nomenclature chart? Maybe some enterprising 'spherian will take on the task of devising it.
RPW

[Mark Blaeuer]

I've lately developed an interest in poetic translation due to Eratosphere, so I hope it's alright to nudge discussion in that direction. Are there reference books for and about the translation process that you translators find particularly useful?

By the way, I keep Patterns of Poetry by Miller Williams next to my Turco. It provides alternative examples, and there's a bit of variance in the forms included.

[This message has been edited by Mark Blaeuer (edited November 24, 2003).]

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Thought I'd bump this one up, since many haven't seen it and there are probably updates to be added.

And no one really answered Mark's question...

A few new additions:

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics [Preminger and Brogan].

One of my current favorites, ever since I found it. I'll just pick a topic and read. It's one I recommend to people who don't know the difference between prose and poetry. There are 1383 pages of 'difference'.

Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, Barbara Hernstein Smith.

Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, Timothy Steele.

This one explains my straying from strict meter *grin*




[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited October 04, 2004).]