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