If my book is able to bring readers closer to more poems, to help them find deep meaning in those poems according to their own particular interests, preferences, and proclivities, then I will have succeeded. I gave a lecture at a few years ago at the Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, in which I discussed an idea that "about" was a limited idea in poetry, very close to "looks like" in painting.
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Maybe you just haven't heard of them yet.
I knew this was true from reading and writing poetry, but until I wrote about this for many years, I didn't really understand it.
An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder
In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. That would be awesome.
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I'm also interested in what kind of assumptions I could make about this book expressing your sensibility as an editor.
While providing a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminating concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone. His readings of poems are subtle and convincing.
But I'm glad I did the work, for my own sake.Travis Nichols: As someone who has written about poetry and been in many conversations about how and if to make it accessible to wider audiences, I have a lot of admiration for what you've done here.
I still do think that is part of what the poem asserts.
In the end, I cut many thousands of words from the book that I had written about that textbook and other widely-used ones (like Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense and others), mainly because the writing I did about them turned out to be super boring. It might seem that in my focus on the material of language, I am asserting that the effects of poetry are less about what it means than how. So I am trying to make deeper, more conceptual connections, that can be applied to very different types and styles of poetry. In it, I try to make the argument that it is not only possible, but necessary, to preserve a free space inside oneself for the imagination. Zapruder’s writing is accessible, easygoing, and welcoming, as if he’s sitting right there talking us through the poems. The Frost Medal and Shelley Memorial Award recognize lifetime and mid-career achievement in poetry.
The result has been generations of wounded, irritated and cynical students who go on to think they hate and don't understand poetry. Don't Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poem…. This reminds me of Keats's famous remark about Wordsworth, that he was guilty of the "egotistical sublime," that is, pretending he was awed by nature when really what he was awed by was his own awe, which he wanted the reader to share.
Matthew Zapruder: It's not hard for me to imagine someone objecting to the idea that there is something universal to be said about poetry, or the very idea that poetry is a distinct genre.
The reaction to this from some people was to assume that I was saying poems aren't about anything at all, which is not what as I think, as should (I hope) be obvious to anyone who reads my poems or prose about poetry. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. I do feel quite strongly that given the current state of thinking and discussion about poetry, that unless we open up these questions in some more interesting ways, people just aren't going to be having very worthwhile reading experiences.
As far as whether it was hard, the answer is yes, but not because I was tempted to write in jargon or using literary theory.
Prime members enjoy fast & free shipping, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Video and many more exclusive benefits. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. One of the many things I like about Why Poetry is that it asks us to try to set aside some of these outside interpretations or inferences in favor of a more narrow reading of the text itself. He breaks down poems 'literally,' in accessible prose that clarifies their meanings ... Is it necessary?
He works at Greenpeace USA. He wants to restore our access to poetry’s considerable gifts, to aid us in reclaiming that birthright.
Zapruder is nothing if not sincere?—?he seems to truly believe in the potential of poetry to improve people’s lives, and, over the course of more than two hundred pages, he lays out his case … The answer, for Zapruder, is nuanced—and it is this quality, nuance, to which Zapruder seems most attracted, even if his intention is to argue in a way that is both direct and clear.
Time and again, I have the experience of talking to really brilliant people, writers and artists and also very smart educated people outside of the literary world, who have absolutely the most limited and boring ideas about poetry that you could imagine.
In his friendly new book, Why Poetry, poet, editor and teacher Matthew Zapruder does this very thing with unusual clarity and generosity." The poem was written in response to the acquittal of a police officer who had murdered a 10 year old boy in Queens. The stakes are (or should be) too high. Before I got my MFA, I was getting a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures, so I had a lot of exposure to that sort of jargon-y, highly technical talk about literature. Which is why there are so many different types of poems, and why in their own ways they can each and all be poetry. MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of four collections of poetry. That's why at some point during the writing of the book I put a lot of time into reading and analyzing the New Critics closely, particularly the best-selling textbook Understanding Poetry, edited by Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In discussing her poem, what I was interested in was how the pressures of events in the external world can start to seem as if they absolutely demand a response in our poetry, and what that means for us as readers and writers.
It's definitely true that I think the how (and why) of poetry require far more explanation than the what. Initially, I thought the subject and effect of the poem was mainly about creating a space of contemplation and privacy and mystery, and that the "thing" that was going to "save America" was, basically, the dream state created by the poem itself. It's just an instinct, but it's one that comes out of a long time of being a poet, and also reading and thinking about it. It's a difficult thing, given that we want any excuse not to actually read a poem. Zapruder explores what poems are and how we can read them so that we can, as Whitman wrote, "possess the origin of all poems" without the aid of any teacher or expert.
Initially, as I said above, one of my main motivations in writing the book was to argue against knee-jerk symbolic readings of poetry, ones that immediately assume that a word or image must "really" mean something else, something supposedly deeper, but which so often turns out to be banal, not really strange or interesting at all.
There is a group of dedicated poetry readers who love the poems they love, but they don't want analysis to impede their enjoyment.
Ironically, the New Critics were trying to bring the study and reading of poetry away from paraphrase. For a long time, really since my second book (which I wrote during the run-up to the 2004 election), politics has been a part of my poetry, just because thinking and worrying about it is as much as part of my life as anything else. Richards?
Whenever the issue of meaning did come up, teachers and students understandably either gravitated back to the very sorts of paraphrase that the New Critics were trying to counter ("the theme of this poem is death"), and/or asserted that meaning isn't an operative concept when it comes to poetry. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with a poem. Someone else's intellectual project could be to tell me why I am wrong, but even so, maybe they will find my attempt interesting and worth reading. A conversation with Eileen Myles, eminent poet, novelist, performer, art journalist, and artist, about their exhibition poems, on view at Bridget Donahue through January 13, 2019, concurrent with the publication of their new collection of poems Evolution (Grove Press, 2018).
I just think meaning-making works differently in poetry than in prose. How it refuses to be beholden to all the other things we use language for.
. His discussion of the enigma of line breaks is first-rate.
Try again. I suppose poetry is a particular temptation to that sort of self-projection. Was it a struggle to write this way about something that does, as you say, bring us out of our everyday experience into magical realms?Matthew Zapruder: Please tell me you actually put on robes and light incense before you read poetry. I like the question, and I find it's actually one that can start interesting conversations with people who don't consider themselves poets, or even poetry readers. I understand Zapruder’s interest in preaching to the unconverted. She does not approve. Of course I have seen a lot of bad poetry that either preaches to the converted, or seems mainly designed to position the poet as a correct and decent person. I guess in the end I am basically a humanist when it comes to literature: I think most of us simply by virtue of being alive, and therefore experienced language users, have the basic equipment to read most literature. Understanding Poetry has believe it or not sold many, many millions of copies, and the odds are good that your English teacher, and your parents, and maybe even you, read that book in class.
He is excellent at describing, in plain language, why poetry is different from other forms of writing, and how it can help people to lead deeper, more emotionally textured lives. As a poet, the process can necessarily be mysterious.
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