The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Copper Canyon Classics) - Softcover

Corn, Alfred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592817 ISBN 13: 9781556592812

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Synopsis

An indispensable guide for poets, readers, students, and teachers.

The Poem’s Heartbeat may well be the finest general book available on prosody.” Library Journal (starred review)

A provocative, definitive manual.” Publishers Weekly

Finally back in print, this slender, user-friendly guide to rhyme, rhythm, meter, and form sparks intuitive and technical lightning-flashes” for poets and readers curious to know a poem’s inner workings. Clear, good-humored, and deeply readable, Alfred Corn’s book is the modern classic on prosody the art and science of poetic meter.

Each of the book’s ten chapters is a progressive, step-by-step presentation rich with examples to illustrate concepts such as line, stress, scansion marks, slant rhyme, and iambic pentameter. By the book’s end,” noted a rave review in The Boston Review, Corn, magi-teacher and impeccable guide, has taught the novice to become artist and magician.” The Poem’s Heartbeat also includes a selected bibliography and encourages readers and students to carry their investigations further.

The word line” comes from the Latin linea, itself derived from the word for a thread of linen. We can look at the lines of poetry as slender compositional units forming a weave like that of a textile. Indeed, the word text” has the same origin as the word textile.” It isn’t difficult to compare the compositional process to weaving, where thread moves from left to right, reaches the margin of the text, then shuttles back to begin the next unit . . .

About this title

About the Author

Alfred Corn is a poet, novelist, and art critic. His poems appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, and the New Republic. He has traveled widely and taught at many universities, including Columbia, UCLA, and Yale. He lives in New York.

From Library Journal

Corn (Part of His Story, LJ 3/15/97), acclaimed poet and teacher, provides a quality guide to rhyme, rhythm, meter, and form for students, experienced readers, and practitioners of poetry. Not merely an introduction to verse form (a subcategory of prosody), this intelligent, user-friendly book guides readers through artistic conventions employed in shaping and measuring a poem. Ten chapters explore the complex and subtle merging of the oral and written English-language tradition into the rhythmic directives of the poet's craft. Corn's text is good-humored and accessible. His experience has deftly led him in organizing what may well be the finest general book available on prosody. Recommended for private, public, and academic libraries. [For a review of Corn's latest book of poetry, see p. 97 and for his first novel, see LJ 3/15/97.?Ed.]?Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New Yor.
-?Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1556592817
• ISBN 13: 9781556592812
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 140