The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide [Hardcover]

Robert Pinsky (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374266956 | ISBN-13: 978-0374266950 | Publication Date: September 30, 1998 | Edition: 1st

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works.

"Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing."

As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud.

He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart.

This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While it's hardly the most traveled of literary destinations, poetry has suffered from no shortage of guidebooks. Still, these poetic baedekers tend to get bogged down in terminology and historical hairsplitting, while the actual music gets lost in the shuffle. We should be thankful, then, for Robert Pinsky's brief, wonderfully readable volume, in which he zooms in on verse as acoustic artifact: "When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist's medium is my breath. The reader's breath and hearing embody the poet's words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual."

Not that Poet Laureate Pinsky gets vague or touchy-feely on us. Poetry, like God, is in the details, and the author starts with the building blocks, the amino acids, of verse: accent and duration. Even the most jaded of readers will benefit from his syllable-by-syllable examination of Thomas Campion's "Now Winter Nights Enlarge" and Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." Moving on through discussions of syntax and line, meter and rhyme (or lack thereof), Pinsky enlists both the usual suspects (Shakespeare, Frost, Hardy, Eliot, Bishop) and some less customary ones (Gilbert & Sullivan, Louise Gluck, and the splendid James McMichael) to make his points. These poems are, in some sense, teaching tools for the author. Yet even his on-the-fly commentary causes us to see them in a new light. Here he is, for example, on the near-monotonous minimalism of W.C. Williams's "To a Poor Old Woman": "The poem dramatizes the taking in of a supposedly ordinary experience, and the playful, almost hectoring repetitions are like an effective sermon in praise of simplicity." The Sounds of Poetry is no less effective a sermon. It leaves your ear (and your heart) attuned to the pleasurable play of poetic language and persuades you that hearing is, indeed, believing. --James Marcus

From Library Journal

Though this book is written by a celebrated poet (the poet laureate of the Untied States), there is little to be gleaned from it. The work is organized in five chapters about the mechanics of poetry: accent, syntax, terms, chimes, and some notes on blank and free verse. This title, oddly written in a humorless, academic first person for the novice, tells us more about what Pinsky thinks than about the subtle merging of the oral and written craft of English verse. Perhaps straining to make the mysteries of poetry accessible, the passages define, advise, and recommend like a set of cobbled lecture notes. Better to stick with Alfred Corn's quality guide, The Poem's Heartbeat (LJ 4/1/97). Pinsky's endeavor is a disappointing enterprise.
-?Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 129 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (September 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374266956
• ISBN-13: 978-0374266950
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #810,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will make you more aware about how poetry sounds!, April 1, 2001

By 

John Dixon (Annapolis, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Paperback)

I have been a fairly big poetry fan for awhile now, but never have been able to pick up how subtle poetry really is. If you are like me and have read poems before, and have felt the frustration in not being able to explain why they sound so wonderful, this book is for you. For instance, who would have known that juxtaposing words with Germnaic and Latin roots can often produce a pleasing effect? Pinsky will allow you to pick up on this.

Some have said that Pinsky is dry and condescending in this work. It's true, Pinsky talks about poetry in a way devoid of all mysticism, but I think this no-nonesense and more objective approach is wonderful. Additionally, I don't see any actual condescension in the work. P's goal is not only to be simple, but also to show how misleading usual terminology can be. However, paradoxically, it is knowledge of what this terminology means and how it is useful, along with how Pinsky's ability to describe how subtle the sounds of poetry are that will teach you how to talk about poetry intelligently, if only with yourself.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fundamental, crucial stuff to be aware of, April 18, 2003

By 

I X Key "burningfield" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Paperback)

for an appreciation of poetry. The sounds of poetry were one of the most important aspects of western poetry before Homer, when the sounds were integral pnemonics for poems to be remembered by many people in many places for long times. Homer's epics were known by rote for their sounds. Language's sounds & music are still one of the most important aspects of poetry today; I think they always will be. Poetics run deep, & with poetry so much is invested in the sounds. This is absolutely the best resource I know for a student of poetry to begin to develop an ear for poetry. To continue to develop it of course you need to care, & you need to read. Pinsky has been doing great services to poetry throughout his career as poet & scholar. I hope this review has been useful to you.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a dull manual, October 14, 2005

By 

a reader in front of the front range - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Paperback)

Don't be deceived by the bad reviews you see from a few others here. What likely disappoints them about this book is its refusal to be useable, to give a method to read or write rhythm, to make illusory markings of beats or syllables. Far from reducing poetry to a scheme, Pinsky brings out the uniqueness of every line, every sounding of words together. He shows how the power of a poem involves tones and speeds and flows of sound played against subtle turns of syntax.

He shies away from neat categories of verse. Instead, he'll show marvels, such as iambic pentameters within Ginsberg's "Howl."

Not only can you learn about poetry here, but find such sentences as: "The emotion, the sexual horniness, produces an artifact of extravagant control." Rather than a book to pick up for practice or study, I found it was hard to put down.