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The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
Binding: Paperback
Author: Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Features:
Average Rating: 4.0
Total Customer Reviews: 18
List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $9.23
Sales Rank: 46977
Product 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 GlĂĽck, and Frank Bidart.
This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.
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Users Product Reviews: |
Product Review Summary: Great Been a fan for a long time. Robert Pinsky reminds me of John siwicki
Poetry of Food and Drink- Warbles-Inflexation-Fences-and Are you Casablanca.
Product Review Summary: A Small but Immensely Valuable Book Pinksky's close careful discussion of how sound works in poetry is immensely instructive, like being taken on a leisurely tour through an art museum accompanied by a first-rate docent. After reading this book, unless you are either already a superb reader or supremely stupid, you will find new registers, new nuances in poems you thought you knew through and through. William Carlos Williams called poems "machines made of words": Pinsky takes several poems apart and carefully points out and explains the workings of some of their most delicate and precise inner mechanisms. I know of no other book that treats this subject as well.
Product Review Summary: aLAS this BOOK is DRY as DUST I actually learned from this book -- in particular, gained an understanding of relative stress and of how the best free verse incorporates meter -- but Pinsky, though he has the love, is dry as can be, bless him.
Product Review Summary: Excellent introduction Robert Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry is an invaluable guide to the most critical--and one of the most neglected--aspects of poetic writing: sound. I first read this book when taking an undergrad poetry-writing course, and I found it immensely helpful.
Pinsky takes a great deal of potentially clunky, academic information and distills it into a fast, easily-digestible handbook. In just over 100 pages, he outlines the essentials of rhythm, meter, the meaning carried by sounds, and the interrelation of all three. For anyone who has read, studied, or written poetry before, there won't be much new here, but having so much good advice in such a concentrated form makes this little book an excellent read. Even several years after taking that course, I still find myself browsing this book, looking for helpful reminders and inspiration.
Pinsky's book is not only helpful and informative, it's a fast, fun read--it both delights and informs. Horace would be proud.
Highly recommended.
Product Review Summary: Not a dull manual Don't be deceived by the bad reviews you see from a few others here. What likely disappoints them about this book is its refusal to be useable, to give a method to read or write rhythm, to make illusory markings of beats or syllables. Far from reducing poetry to a scheme, Pinsky brings out the uniqueness of every line, every sounding of words together. He shows how the power of a poem involves tones and speeds and flows of sound played against subtle turns of syntax.
He shies away from neat categories of verse. Instead, he'll show marvels, such as iambic pentameters within Ginsberg's "Howl."
Not only can you learn about poetry here, but find such sentences as: "The emotion, the sexual horniness, produces an artifact of extravagant control." Rather than a book to pick up for practice or study, I found it was hard to put down.
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