Poetry as Persuasion (The Life of Poetry: Poets on Their Art and Craft) [Paperback]

Carl Dennis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2001 | Series: The Life of Poetry: Poets on Their Art and Craft

Focusing on the relation of the poet to the reader, Carl Dennis proposes that poems are acts of persuasion and that the strength of a poem's speaker is the key to winning the reader's sympathetic attention. Dennis identifies the qualities of passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness as essential in creating a compelling speaker. This emphasis on character leads to fresh discussions of point of view, irony, myth, and genre. Each subject is developed through careful readings of a wide variety of poets--from Whitman and Dickinson to contemporaries. Lucidly written, Poetry as Persuasion offers both inspiration and important advice for practicing poets, and at the same time provides anyone with an interest in poetry a fresh understanding of its appeal.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With Whitman and Dickinson as his touchstones and contemporary American poetry as his specific purview, Carl Dennis brilliantly demonstrates in Poetry as Persuasion why poetic voice is essential to the process of lyric articulation. Dennis's essays are particularly useful to poets learning their craft and to students of poetry, but every reader will find delight in the calm and lucid intelligence each page holds."--Michael Collier

"Poetry as Persuasion is the result of the careful consideration of long learning. Dennis has done all the work for us and modestly offers us its fruit in his complete articulation of a single, large, useful idea. His readings are almost unerringly sharp. The range of his examples is generous, and the way he compares and contrasts them is invariably pertinent. He is a reliable tour guide and gentle teacher."--Michael Ryan

About the Author

Carl Dennis is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, Practical Gods, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. He is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (March 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820322482
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322483
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,336,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucid, comprehensive, deeply insightful, October 30, 2006

By 

Private Citizen "PC" (Oxford MS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poetry as Persuasion (The Life of Poetry: Poets on Their Art and Craft) (Paperback)

This collection of essays by one of our best poets focuses in depth and in particular on the way a poetic speaker builds a relationship with the reader; by shifts of tone and by including counter-evidence, by testing one's own assertions, etc-- Dennis says-- among many other things-- that the poet must build an ethical presence. But there are many many ways to build the presence of this speaker, this poetic relationship. His arguments are really quite brilliant, his readings of poems are terrifically insightful but never laborious, his examples are wide ranging, and the themes of various chapters are incisive and distinct. More than anything though, Dennis's mind seems shockingly clear and well-organized. I don't know of any book of essays about the making of poems which is so clearly, unpretentiously presented, and yet has so much to teach. For the experienced, so called "professional", or for the beginning student of pem-making, this book can be enabling and profoundly useful. A real joy to read and learn from. Dennis 's introduction, in which he sketches out the classical rhetorical frameworks of poetry, is worth the price of the book. Read it.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Two stars -- one for effort, the other for, May 30, 2010

By 

JNagarya (Reality) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poetry as Persuasion (The Life of Poetry: Poets on Their Art and Craft) (Paperback)

obviously not being embarrassed.

This book proves a common discovery: that most poets can't write prose to save their lives. Or that respects the language. So instead they produce the unreadable.

It appears that the author didn't have to deal with an editor, and it shows: irrationality and incoherence abound (those arguably an essence of and acceptable in poetry). And that he doesn't know that writing is RE-writing, therefore he failed to sufficiently digest, through RE-writes, what he wanted to say, in order to arrive at a point at which HE understood what he wanted to say. And the lack of distance and objectivity which results from the insufficient digestion of insufficient rewrite -- shows as a prose that appears so wholly fascinated with and aborbed in its own navel -- in effort to figure out what it is and means -- that it is unaware there's a reader present and watching.

This needs BOTH an editor, and rewriting. Until that happens it is so much a chore to read that one must often reread one or another nonsensically convoluted sentence in effort to get the point hidden somewhere amid the polysyllabic effluvia. Academics, and especially semi-academics, need to learn and apply a basic rule: reading a book should be a pleasure, not a chore which exhausts for all the wrong reasons.

An editor and a rewrite -- or three -- would likely eliminate the unreadable and as result reduce the thickness of the thing by roughly 1/4". As it is the effort to read this is an unnecessary, off-putting struggle.

I emailed the publisher with the above concerns, though not as sharply stated. No response. Apparently the editor, if there is one, was then -- and continues to be -- out to lunch.

All in all, stick with writers about poetry who sufficiently digest, through rewrites, that they intend to say to understand it themselves -- instead of inflicting the indeterminately-semi-baked onto the hapless reader.