The Sounds of Poetry
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$18.00
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Sounds of Poetry
$18.00
Sale price
$18.00
Regular price
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.Book Details
- Publisher:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- ISBN:
- 9780374526177
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Pages:
- 144
- Authors:
- Robert Pinsky
- Published Date:
- 1999-09-01
- Language:
- English
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Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
My first job, in the 7th grade, was shoveling the sidewalks of my apartment complex in Western New York. The manager paid me $10 if it was under a foot of snow, $20 if it was over, and it always snowed, so I'd wake up at 5am before school and start digging. My grandmother called me "The Snow Man" and explained the reference, then later gave me a copy of Wallace Stevens' selected poems. I loved the music of those lines and recited them to myself in the cold. "One must have a mind of winter .... scrape ... to regard the frost on the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow ... scrape ..." Years later, I encountered Robert Pinsky's breakdown of that music in The Sounds of Poetry, but I already knew it by heart.