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

Pinsky, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393050688 ISBN 13: 9780393050684

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

A bold new approach to writing (and reading) poetry based on great poetry of the past.

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made― in terms borrowed from the “singing school” of William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Robert Pinsky’s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets.

This anthology respects poetry’s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Pinsky is the award-winning author of over twenty volumes of poetry. He served as United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. He teaches at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

In this sparkling teaching anthology, Pinsky—poet, poet laureate (1997–2000), and poetry editor for Slate—focuses on how poets read poetry in order to learn how to write poetry, taking his instructive title from William Butler Yeats: “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” Pinsky has selected a tremendously fresh and exciting variety of salient poems and organized them into sections titled “Freedom,” “Listening,” “Form,” and “Dreaming Things Up.” He introduces each of the 80 selections with an illuminating bit of analysis (Robert Frost is “a sexier, more adventuresome poet than he may get credit for”) and a challenge: Can you “write something as master-of-fact, yet as far-out” as Emily Dickinson? Knowledgeable and puckish, Pinsky seeks to foster a deeper sense of the meaning of words and a fuller understanding of their “feel and aroma” while praising the imagination for how it “transfigures” perception. With brief bios of the poets, from Sappho to Andrew Marvell, Langston Hughes, and Marianne Moore, this stimulating and creative guide will intrigue and enlighten everyone interested in poetry. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0393050688
• ISBN 13: 9780393050684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240