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3.5 

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

By Robert Pinsky
Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters by Robert Pinsky digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

“Magnificent . . . poems to inspire [with] brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them.”—Alan Cheuse, NPR

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.

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3 Reviews

3.5
“This is a good resource for students of poetry writing, or just wanting to know more about poetry, similar to a workshop, minus the writing part This is a good book, I am not familiar with most of the poets featured in the book. What I like about this book is Mr. Pinsky encouraged readers to practice reading poems they really like and writing it down by copying or memorizing, putting it into practice in knowing the poem by "heart". Also the book is divided by parts that talks about free form, listening to the poems like a song and how the words flow through, variety of forms that used traditional and yet has its own unique voice, and dreaming things up, which has that surreal feel of the poem. If you are looking for a book that teaches you the basics of poetry, this is not for you, this is just a handy guideline or short workshop that talks about different aspects of Poetry, based on different examples of poems written by the masters of the field. Mr Pinsky's explanation in each parts is simple with a dash of Philosophical, and starts each poems with a question a tidbit of explanation about the poem. W.W. Norton is for me one of the best publication of academic books that doesn't look like textbooks.”

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