How Poetry Works

How Poetry Works PDF Author: Phil Roberts
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141928107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In this refreshing and inspiring book, Phil Roberts asserts that poetry, like music, is based on sound and so close attention should be paid to its rhythms and metrical patterns. He illustrates his points with lively examples ranging from nursery rhymes and limericks to recent experimental forms as well as familiar pieces from over the centuries. The book concludes with a Millennium Anthology, a salute to the poetry of the past thousand years, including pieces from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA.

How Poetry Works

How Poetry Works PDF Author: Phil Roberts
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141928107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this refreshing and inspiring book, Phil Roberts asserts that poetry, like music, is based on sound and so close attention should be paid to its rhythms and metrical patterns. He illustrates his points with lively examples ranging from nursery rhymes and limericks to recent experimental forms as well as familiar pieces from over the centuries. The book concludes with a Millennium Anthology, a salute to the poetry of the past thousand years, including pieces from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA.

American Originality

American Originality PDF Author: Louise Glück
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466875682
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A luminous collection of essays from Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection. From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.

A Little Book on Form

A Little Book on Form PDF Author: Robert Hass
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062332449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass. Robert Hass—former poet laureate, winner of the National Book Award, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation. A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.

This Promise of Change

This Promise of Change PDF Author: Jo Ann Allen Boyce
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1681198533
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In 1956, one year before federal troops escorted the Little Rock 9 into Central High School, fourteen year old Jo Ann Allen was one of twelve African-American students who broke the color barrier and integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee. At first things went smoothly for the Clinton 12, but then outside agitators interfered, pitting the townspeople against one another. Uneasiness turned into anger, and even the Clinton Twelve themselves wondered if the easier thing to do would be to go back to their old school. Jo Ann--clear-eyed, practical, tolerant, and popular among both black and white students---found herself called on as the spokesperson of the group. But what about just being a regular teen? This is the heartbreaking and relatable story of her four months thrust into the national spotlight and as a trailblazer in history. Based on original research and interviews and featuring backmatter with archival materials and notes from the authors on the co-writing process.

Beautiful & Pointless

Beautiful & Pointless PDF Author: David Orr
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062079417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Poetry

Poetry PDF Author: Jeffrey Wainwright
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415287630
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
"Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it looks at aspects including : how technical aspects such as rhythm and measures work; how different tones of voice affect a poem; how poetic language relates to everyday language; how different types of poetry work, from sonnets to free verse; and how the form and 'space' of a poem contribute to its meaning." "Poetry: The Basics is an invaluable and easy-to-read guide for anyone wanting to get to grips with reading and writing poetry."--Jacket.

Why Poetry

Why Poetry PDF Author: Matthew Zapruder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062343092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Actions & Travels

Actions & Travels PDF Author: Anna Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781869409180
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A brilliant introduction to how poetry works through one hundred poems.Through illuminating readings of one hundred poems - from Catullus to Alice Oswald, Shakespeare to Hera Lindsay Bird - Actions & Travels is an engaging introduction to how poetry works. Ten chapters look at simplicity and resonance, imagery and form, letters and odes, and much more. In Actions & Travels Anna Jackson explains how we can all read (and even write) poetry.

The Discovery of Poetry

The Discovery of Poetry PDF Author: Frances Mayes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156007627
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, Mayes shows how focusing on one aspect of a poem can help you to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the reading and writing experience.

The Sounds of Poetry

The Sounds of Poetry PDF Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466878495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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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.