Sound Ideas
Poetry weds the body to the soul, andSound Ideasis a superb introduction to the manifold ways in which poets touch us to the core of our being. The neglected art of poetry, its forms and physicality, is the occasion for a journey into the musical heart of verse: the dance that makes the world go round. Professors McCarthy and Quinn, a scholar and a poet, respectively, draw on decades of experience in the classroom to explain how a line works, the function of meter and rhyme, the value of metaphor, and a host of other matters, in an engaging style. This should be required reading for anyone interested in poetry, particularly for those who hope to make poems themselves. A brilliant book. --Christopher Merrill, poet, Director of the International Writing Program, University of IowaT. S. Eliot once said that a poem tends to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and image.Sound Ideasby Gene McCarthy and Fran Quinn suggests that if Eliot is right, then perhaps the usual methods of reading the poem on the page is not enough. As the wonderful pun in the title of their book suggests, ideas are only sound (reliable) when they are embodied in the sounds (music) words make. The study of poems, then, needs to include what this book so aptly provides: instruction in speaking and listening to words since the sound of a word itself expresses meaning and emotion. While the opening chapters guide the reader (and teacher) through the methodology of reading by speaking how the use of the line effects meaning and emotion; how a poem s matrix of vowels and consonants embody the poem s meaning; how rhythm is always the motion of the poem s emotional life the latter chapters work through the more usual aspects of poetry (meter, image, metaphor, form). But throughout, the unique appeal of this book is its emphasis on how to speak and hear the poem. In the end, speaking and learning how to hear the poem brings the reader closer and closer to the poem s sound ideas, that mysterious and startling moment when tongue, ear, and brain are all sounding together. --Robert Cording, poet, Barrett Chair of Creative Writing at College of the Holy CrossHard to believe that anyone serious about poetry, either student or teacher, wouldn't want to own this book. ReadingSound Ideasis like being in a class with the best poet and teacher of your life. McCarthy and Quinn are those poet teachers, each having fallen in love with poetry, each having given over their lives to its beauty and power. And this book is that classroom, one which comes alive with force and pleasure, with their shared belief that poetry itself comes truly alive when one speaks and hears it, when it enters the consciousness through that breath and release, when it has the power to change lives. This book offers something new and necessary in the study of poetry. --John Hodgen, poet