Singing School: Learning To Write (And Read) Poetry By Studying with the Masters
by Robert Pinsky
Buy on AmazonQuick, 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. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable. Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works, finding intense verbal music, wild imagination in matter-of-fact language, surrealist aplomb, and subtlety in meter.--From publisher description.
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"A marvelous, career-crowning, 80-poem anthology with brief essays and headnotes offers Robert Pinsky’s account of how he learned to write (and read) poetry by studying the masters of the form. The poems range from Michelangelo’s lament about the difficulties of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to Gregory Corso on marriage; Frank O’Hara, Yeats and Marianne Moore on poetry; Whitman on the Civil War dead; Sappho, Pound and Sylvia Plath on love; and Sterling Brown on a sleeping Harlem."
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