Who Reads Poetry

Who Reads Poetry PDF Author: Fred Sasaki
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022650476X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
In 2012, to celebrate the centennial of Poetry, the Press published The Open Door:100 Poems,100 Years of Poetry Magazine, edited by Share and Wiman; that is the model for this new anthology of fifty essays about reading poetry. All were commissioned by Poetry for a column called The View From Here, in which people "from outside the world of poetry" are invited to describe when and why they read poetry. The editors sought contributions from philosophers and journalists, musicians and artists, doctors and soldiers, an iron-worker, a lawyer, anthropologist, economist, and politician. Contributors include Neko Case, Roger Ebert, Richard Rorty, Rhymefest, Lynda Barry, Daniel Handler, and Alex Ross. They have arranged the essays in groups and pulled out quotes to open each of the eight sections as a way to suggest themes without trying to prescribe how the pieces should be read. Each essay retains its own voice, and many are surprising, provocative, touching, or funny.

Don't Read Poetry

Don't Read Poetry PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465094511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Avidly Reads Poetry

Avidly Reads Poetry PDF Author: Jacquelyn Ardam
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479813613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
“Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world” Poetry is everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing “The Hill We Climb” before the nation at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, to poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before. Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come into play around the different ways it is written and shared. Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author’s personal and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry breathes life into poems of every genre—from alphabet poems and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Rupi Kaur’s Instapoetry—and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it? Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the nation we live in. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall between poetry and “the rest of us.”

How To Read A Poem

How To Read A Poem PDF Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547543727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives. How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. "The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read as poem is: Ecstatically."—Boston Book Review

Why Poetry

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

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.

The Half-God of Rainfall

The Half-God of Rainfall PDF Author: Inua Ellams
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008324786
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description
From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.

How to Read Poetry Like a Professor

How to Read Poetry Like a Professor PDF Author: Thomas C. Foster
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006268406X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
From the bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes this essential primer to reading poetry like a professor that unlocks the keys to enjoying works from Lord Byron to the Beatles. No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree—a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history—and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers—intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—than other literary forms. Most of us started out loving poetry because it filled our beloved children's books from Dr. Seuss to Robert Louis Stevenson. Eventually, our reading shifted to prose and later when we encountered poetry again, we had no recent experience to make it feel familiar. But reading poetry doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. In an entertaining and engaging voice, Thomas C. Foster shows readers how to overcome their fear of poetry and learn to enjoy it once more. From classic poets such as Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to later poets such as E.E. Cummings, Billy Collins, and Seamus Heaney, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor examines a wide array of poems and teaches readers: How to read a poem to understand its primary meaning. The different technical elements of poetry such as meter, diction, rhyme, line structures, length, order, regularity, and how to learn to see these elements as allies rather than adversaries. How to listen for a poem’s secondary meaning by paying attention to the echoes that the language of poetry summons up. How to hear the music in poems—and the poetry in songs! With How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, readers can rediscover poetry and reap its many rewards.

Avidly Reads Poetry

Avidly Reads Poetry PDF Author: Jacquelyn Ardam
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479813583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Book Description
"More Americans are reading poetry in the 21st century than ever before. This books asks: how do poems come to us? How do they make us feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for? Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it? Each chapter links a reason why we might read poetry (to want, to learn, to resist, to soothe) with a type of poem (the sonnet, the alphabet poem, the documentary poem, the internet poem). Through readings of poems written in English from Shakespeare through today, and through reading the American cultures in which we read them, the book thinks about how poems are embedded in our lives: in our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media, sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of the nation we live in"--

How to Read a Poem-- and Start a Poetry Circle

How to Read a Poem-- and Start a Poetry Circle PDF Author: Molly Peacock
Publisher: Riverhead Books (Hardcover)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
"If poetry is a tantalizing invitation - into the world the poem conjures, the interior life of the poet, our own interior lives - then How to Read a Poem ... and Start a Poetry Circle is a means of accepting that invitation. In gathering a potent group of poems she calls her "talismans" into this slender volume, Molly Peacock presents us with a book of ways to explore the romance we have with words we can't quite hold." "Like a friend, she introduces us to her friends; she shows us how to form poetry circles of our own to share our private pleasures within the rounded borders of a communal reading group. Finally, Peacock provides us with the recommendations of fellow poets with which to begin our own poetry-reading experience - and the rich, enthralling, and endlessly rewarding search for talismans of our own."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Don't Read Poetry

Don't Read Poetry PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465094511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.