Streams: Life Secrets for Writing Poems and Songs

by Sandra Hochman

Turner Publishing is proud to present a new edition of Sandra Hochman's treatise on poetry and songwriting, Streams . First published by Prentice-Hall in 1978, Hochman's approach to teaching is just as unconventional and revelatory today as it was forty years ago.

From the Introduction by This is a personal book that I hope will be like a friend. In a simple way I want to tell you some thoughts that I have about writing poetry and songs, and share with you some warm-up exercises for writing that can be used to limber up the mind the same way that dancers limber before a performance. Writing has always been for me a necessary experience— something that I feel compelled to do. If that feeling of wanting to write is inside of you—what I call the Necessary Angel wanting to speak—that writing can be a part of your life experience the way it is part of mine.

171 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 2, 2017

About the author

American poet, novelist, journalist and filmmaker. Hockman's first husband was concert violinist Ivry Gitlis, and in 1965 she married Harvey Leve, an international lawyer with whom she has one daughter and who she later divorced. Hochman took her undergraduate degree from Bennington College in 1957 and then studied at the Sorbonne. She has been poet-in-residence at Fordham University and City College of New York. She received the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for Manhattan Pastures (1963).