The Sounds of Poetry

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466878495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud. He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.

The Sounds of Poetry

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374526176
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Citing the work of 50 different poets--from Shakespeare and Donne to Elizabeth Bishop and Frank Bidart--the Poet Laureate explains the principles of the sounds of what is called poetry.

The Sounds of Poetry

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 9780374266950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
America's Poet Laureate offers a fascinating journey inside the world of poetry to explore the fundamental workings of this literary art, explaining how different sounds can be used to express meaning and images. 25,000 first printing.

History of My Heart

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 146687841X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Book Description
History of My Heart, winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, first appeared in 1984. In The New Republic, J.D. McClatchy called it "one of the best books of the past decade." It is Pinsky's third volume of poems--and an ideal introduction to the work of a vital and original contemporary American poet.

Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393050688
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Back cover: "With selections from Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, Sappho, WIlliam Carlos Williams, and many others, "Singing school" offers a bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past. Instead of offering rules, theories, or recipes, Robert Pinsky's headnotes for each of the eighty poems and brief introductions to each section respect poetry's mysteries, in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable."

At the Foundling Hospital

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374158118
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
"At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from 'the emanation of a dead star still alive' to the 'pinhole iris of your mortal eye'"--Amazon.com.

Sound and Form in Modern Poetry

Author: Harvey Seymour Gross
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472065172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
An updated and expanded version of a classic and essential text on prosody.

A Poetry Handbook

Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156724005
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.

Jersey Rain

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466894318
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 58

Book Description
Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate "It spends itself regardless into the ocean. It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright: Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction, The chilly liquefaction of day to night, The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one: It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River, Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne. I feel it churning even in fair weather To craze distinction, dry the same as wet." --from "Jersey Rain" Jersey Rain--at once masterly and intimate--marks a fresh, lyrical stage of Robert Pinsky's work. Poems like "Samurai Song," "ABC," "Ode to Meaning," "To Television," and "The Green Piano" have already attracted a wide readership. Now, assembled in this book, they become part of a larger, fugue-like meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven.

The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

Author: Tony Hoagland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002697
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (New York Times) demystifies the elusive element of voice. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning—but above all, alive. The twelve short chapters of The Art of Voice explore ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, material imagination, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices as an enriching source of texture in the poem. A comprehensive appendix contains thirty stimulating models and exercises that will help poets cultivate their craft. Mining his personal experience as a poet and analyzing a wide range of examples from Catullus to Marie Howe, Hoagland provides a lively introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.