Robin Behn

Robin Behn, one of the editors of this book, was teaching in the Masters of Fine Arts Program in writing at the University of Alabama when this book was published. She had published one book of poetry at that time, Paper Bird, and the book won an award from the Associated Writing Programs Award Series. She had another book due out the year following the publication of The Practice of Poetry. Behn contributed one of the poetry exercises to this book, "Letter Poems" in Part Three, Who's Talking and Why? The Self and Its Subjects, Section A Aspects of Voice. Behn likens the feeling of reading a "letter poem" to the guilty pleasure of reading something one is not supposed to read and compares the reader of the poems to an "eavesdropper." Behn instructs students to "ground themselves in specifics" for this poetry exercises, specifics such as...