Pinsky, Robert

Average customer rating:

Excellent introduction
Not a dull manual
A Guide to Hearing Poetry Better
Not Beneficial
fundamental, crucial stuff to be aware of

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide
Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Speech | Words & Language | Reference | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Nonfiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Reference Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

ASIN: 0374526176

Amazon.com

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

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent introduction.......2007-03-09

Robert Pinsky's The Sounds of Poetry is an invaluable guide to the most critical--and one of the most neglected--aspects of poetic writing: sound. I first read this book when taking an undergrad poetry-writing course, and I found it immensely helpful.

Pinsky takes a great deal of potentially clunky, academic information and distills it into a fast, easily-digestible handbook. In just over 100 pages, he outlines the essentials of rhythm, meter, the meaning carried by sounds, and the interrelation of all three. For anyone who has read, studied, or written poetry before, there won't be much new here, but having so much good advice in such a concentrated form makes this little book an excellent read. Even several years after taking that course, I still find myself browsing this book, looking for helpful reminders and inspiration.

Pinsky's book is not only helpful and informative, it's a fast, fun read--it both delights and informs. Horace would be proud.

Highly recommended.

Not a dull manual.......2005-10-14

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.

A Guide to Hearing Poetry Better.......2005-03-26

Too many poetry books (and teachers) approach meter as though it were a clearly defined binary system of equally stressed and equally unstressed syllables. Robert Pinsky is largely successful at showing how to appreciate the rich variety of sounds in the English language while avoiding a lot of technical terms and descriptions. It's important to keep in mind that this is not intended as an overview of the basics of poetry, but a "brief guide" to one aspect of how poetry works. He discusses rhythm and meter (including the effects of duration and pitch), rhyme and its variations, and blank and free verse. There were a few aspects of the book I didn't fully agree with. Pinsky treats all meter as variations of iambic. He includes some elements of word choice (particularly etymology) that are not convincingly related to sounds. And his tone is at times too simplistic - not condescending, exactly, but annoyingly dumbed down. However, this short book is well worth reading to get a poet's perspective on the importance of sound in verse.

Not Beneficial.......2005-03-18

I purchased this book because of my interest in metric poetry but to my disappointment I learned almost nothing from the book. If you want to read a good 5-star book on the subject then I suggest "A Poem's Heartbeat" by Alfred Corn.

fundamental, crucial stuff to be aware of.......2003-04-19

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.

Average customer rating:

Very Disappointing
A reading of the life of David
A poetic riff on a famous life
By a Poet, of a Poet, for a Poet
Not for Jewish, Christian or Muslim Believers

The Life of David
Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Schocken
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Religious | Leaders & Notable People | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Israel | Middle East | History | Subjects | Books

History of Religion | Judaism | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Biographies | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside History Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Religion & Spirituality Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Maimonides (Jewish Encounters)
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
Barney Ross (Jewish Encounters)
The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel
Jesus and Yahweh : The Names Divine

ASIN: 0805242031
Release Date: 2005-09-06

Book Description

Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David’s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David’s life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms——traditionally considered to be David’s own words——Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David’s story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative.

Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky’s erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David——both the man and the idea of the man——is brought brilliantly to life.

Customer Reviews:

Very Disappointing.......2007-01-03

This book was very disappointing. It was written in a stream of consciousness style with bizarre attempts to integrate modern analogies and to compare David to modern figures from unrelated fields. I had the feeling that it was written in one weekend without the scholarly research for which I would have hoped.

A reading of the life of David .......2006-12-08

This is in a way a surprising work. One would have expected a poet like Pinsky to have somehow concentrated on the work which was the Jewish Tradition attributes to King David, the work which is arguably the greatest body of religious poetry ever written, Tehiilim( Psalms). Instead Pinsky retells the whole story of David chronlogically.He retells the story and often artfully reinterprets it .He does this by making wide-ranging and often telling literary comparisons. In the course of this he rejects a basic apologetic line which sees David only as king of virtue, and ancestor of the Messiah to come. He tries instead to see David whole in all his flawed greatness.
In the course of reading this work I learned much about David some of which I should have known about before. I believe that the great share of readers will find much to learn here not only about David, but about the Biblical world of which he is a part.
Nonetheless there are essential perhaps most essential elements in the life of David , that I believe are not fully treated here. Above all David's relation to G-d , a relation so intensely and powerfully given in Tehillim is not really studied here.

A poetic riff on a famous life.......2006-08-04

Reading Robert Pinsky's work, one finds great difficulty placing the book in any particular genre. Biographic analysis of biblical characters seems something of a rage at the moment, some excellent, some not. "The Life of David," however, does not fit well with the genre. Unlike the Biblical scholar Baruch Halperin's brilliant "David's Secret Demons" Pinsky eschews footnotes or deep textual analysis. Instead, taking a poet's view, we see here a sort of emotional/artistic portrait of this most complex of biblical characters. Some may find frustrating the way the author moves over the story often moving down strange tangents only to circle back later.

To call the prose of a former laureate poetic may seem odd, but one must consider how well Pinsky textures his words. Perhaps given David's own poetic nature, only one who shared his great love of language could bring the King of Israel to life. While the trip may on occasion grow strange, those who wish to deepen their understanding of King David will find much here to give food for thought.

By a Poet, of a Poet, for a Poet.......2005-11-16

This latest by Robert Pinsky is perhaps his best work. The author's goal is to understand the complex, paradoxical life of David, not to deconstruct David according to post-modern analysis, biblical hermeneutics, or text-criticism. It's a lovely book to read since its subject is actually Pinsky's love affair with the biblical portrayal of David. As others have loved David, despite his faults, so too does the author.

Part of the charm of this volume is Pinsky's luxurious prose. Thus, for example, the author comments on David's lament when David learns that his general Abner has been murdered: "Where the lament for Saul and Jonathan is like a fountain, this poem is like an engraved amulet, implicit and enigmatic, where the earlier dirge is full-throated. A lament for one who is betrayed rather than one who falls in battle..."

If the reader is looking for analysis of what the Bible "means",
this is not the book for you. For those who have always been
irresistibly attracted to the Bible's poetry and want to find a soulmate, this is a volume to read and treasure.

Not for Jewish, Christian or Muslim Believers.......2005-10-20

This book is fine, as long as you do not believe the Old Testament to be true as history or theology.

An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Average customer rating:

Poetry: How to get started and enjoy it!
The CD does not play on my CD players
Great Teaching Tool
A Superb Poetry Anthology With Accompanying DVD
Perhaps the best of the series

An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Americans' Favorite Poems
The Sounds of Poetry : A Brief Guide
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
A Poetry Handbook

ASIN: 039305876X

Book Description

A multimedia collection of poems introduced by American readers, featuring a DVD including a video introduction by Robert Pinsky.

For a reader unaccustomed to reading poetry, or who has fallen away from the custom, this collection offers an inviting way into the art, or back into it. For readers devoted to poetry, it offers illuminating examples of the infinitely various ways a poem reaches a reader.

In both the book and the videos on the accompanying DVD, poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, and Dickinson as well as contemporary poets are introduced by people from across the United States—a construction worker, a Supreme Court justice, a glassblower, a marine—each of whom speaks about his or her connection to the poem. Their comments are variously poignant, funny, heartening, tart, penetrating, and eccentric, showing some of the ways poetry is alive for American readers. An Invitation to Poetry will inspire a fresh experience of poetry's pleasure and insight.

Customer Reviews:

Poetry: How to get started and enjoy it!.......2007-05-13

This book and it's accompanying DVD were an unexpected pleasure.
I have a young relative who has a major interest in poetry. And I had the opportunity to attend a discussion lead by Robert Pinsky. Given these 'messages', I thought I better attend the Pinksky gathering and learn something. Indeed I did learn and indeed I found a new pleasure. I would recommend An Invitation to Poetry to anyone who has a flicker of interest or no interest in poety. That's where I started.
The accompanying DVD is what grabs you. It is real people from many backgrounds and age groups sharing what poem they most love. Then they read or recite it. It'll blow you away. I found seeing the DVD a motivating factor for reading the poetry. All schools would do well to expose their students to this DVD.

The CD does not play on my CD players.......2007-05-07

The title says it all. The CD just simply cannot be read by my four CD players. Too much trouble to send it back. It is unlikely that the next CD will work. If the recordings are important to you don't take a chance.

Great Teaching Tool.......2006-04-30

I was introduced to this book in a graduate level English course on Poetry and Performance. I am now a 10th grade English teacher and have used the DVD accompanying this book in an introductory lesson to my poetry unit, during which I require students to compile a portfolio of their favorite poems. Students seem to really enjoy watching the clips, especially the one of the young man who chose "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks and the young woman who reads "Minstrel Man" by Langston Hughes. I am now buying another copy of this book as a gift for the teacher who hosted me during my student teaching. This book is worth much more than what you pay for it.

A Superb Poetry Anthology With Accompanying DVD.......2005-08-10

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project shortly after the Library of Congress appointed him to the post in 1997. Since its inception, the Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives.

"An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology" is the third volume of Pinsky's publicly and critically acclaimed series in which Americans, from ages 5 to 97, from many states, of diverse occupations and education, are asked to submit their favorite poems and to explain why the poem is important to them. Some of the readers' comments are as moving as the poetry itself.

The work included in this volume represents poets from all over the world throughout the centuries. The enclosed documentary DVD, which is a companion piece to this compilation, features twenty-eight contributors reading their own selections along with an introduction by Pinsky. The readers range in age and background from two 11-year-olds to 97-year-old former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz to a Supreme Court justice. One of the segments that really moved and inspired me is by a Vietnam War Veteran who cries in front of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C., while reading "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa: "I go down the 58,022 names / half-expecting to find / my own in letters like smoke."

I found many of my own favorites in this extraordinary collection. I was also introduced to several wonderful new poems I might never have read otherwise. Included here are works by: Sappho, Shakespeare, Goethe, Keats, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, as well as more contemporary poems like those by Yehuda Amichai, and Saadi Youssef. The book emphasizes the pure joy of reading poetry. And, it appears, that poetry appreciation is alive and well in America!

I highly recommend this anthology to poetry lovers everywhere, and also the first two publications from The Favorite Poem Project: "America's Favorite Poems," and, "Poems To Read." These extraordinary volumes are all edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. And if you do not particularly care for poetry, this collection may change your mind.
JANA

Perhaps the best of the series.......2005-03-01

This is the third volume of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's acclaimed Favorite Poem Project, in which he has invited Americans, from all walks of life and a variety of heritages, to share their favorite poems, and to explain why the poem is significant to them. They have been very enjoyable anthologies, representing, too, poets from all eras and parts of the world, familiar and obscure. But this may be the best one so far, because it includes a documentary DVD of twenty-eight individuals featured in the book, reading their favorite poems and describing how these poems affected and reflected their lives. The five- to ten-minute segments feature everyone from two charming 11-year-olds, to 97-year-old former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz. Some of them have very moving stories, like the young woman describing her family's flight from the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and the Vietnam Vet who breaks down while reading "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa in front of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. The featured readers are basically from three parts fo the country (Massachusetts, California and Georgia), but they are nevertheless a wonderful cross-section. And they all read their poems eloquently. It really brought this project to a more personal level. So my advice is: accept the invitation; you'll be glad you came.

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, Bilingual Edition

Average customer rating:

Medieval vision of the afterlife
Abandon hope
Infernal Translating
Best book I've ever read
touring Hell in cargo pants

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, Bilingual Edition
Dante
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

All Italian Books | Italian | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Canterbury Tales (Puffin Classics)
King Lear (New Folger Library Shakespeare)
Beowulf: A New Telling
The Aeneid
A Modern Reader's Guide to Dante's the Divine Comedy

ASIN: 0374525315

Amazon.com

The one quality that all classic works of literature share is their timelessness. Shakespeare still plays in Peoria 400 years after his death because the stories he dramatized resonate in modern readers' hearts and minds; methods of warfare have changed quite a bit since the Trojan War described by Homer in his Iliad, but the passions and conflicts that shaped such warriors as Achilles, Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Odysseus still find their counterparts today on battlefields from Bosnia to Afghanistan. Likewise, a little travel guide to hell written by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri in the 13th century remains in print at the end of the 20th century, and it continues to speak to new generations of readers. There have been countless translations of the Inferno, but this one by poet Robert Pinsky is both eloquent and tailored to our times.

Yes, this is an epic poem, but don't let that put you off. An excellent introduction provides context for the work, while detailed notes on each canto are a virtual who's who of 13th-century Italian politics, culture, and literature. Best of all, Pinsky's brilliant translation communicates the horror, despair, and terror of hell with such immediacy, you can almost smell the sulfur and feel the heat from the rain of fire as Dante--led by his faithful guide Virgil--descends lower and lower into the pit. Dante's journey through Satan's kingdom must rate as one of the great fictional travel tales of all time, and Pinsky does it great justice.

Book Description

This widely praised version of Dante's masterpiece, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve Dante's terza rima form without distorting the flow of English idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: "A brilliant success," as Bernard Knox wrote in The New York Review of Books.

Customer Reviews:

Medieval vision of the afterlife.......2007-05-01

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization. The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary. Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul. He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century. Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership. The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife. He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood. Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence. In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life. Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid. Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid. Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid. Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy. They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud. Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society. These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom. The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins. There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one. For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin. Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful. In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm. In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law. Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere. She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship. A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante. Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence. Farinata predicted Dante's exile. Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God. In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides. The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch. Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members. This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile. Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile. Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud. In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc. Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices. Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire. Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted. This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile. In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism. He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church. Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation. After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads. Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind. The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer. The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy. Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant. By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves. He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Abandon hope.......2007-01-11

"Midway life's journey I was made aware/that I had strayed into a dark forest..." Those eerie words open the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno," the most famous part of the legendary Divina Comedia. But the stuff going on here is anything but divine, as Dante explores the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno.

The date is Good Friday of the year 1300, and Dante is lost in a creepy dark forest, being assaulted by a trio of beasts who symbolize his own sins. But suddenly he is rescued ("Not man; man I once was") by the legendary poet Virgil, who takes the despondent Dante under his wing -- and down into Hell.

But this isn't a straightforward hell of flames and dancing devils. Instead, it's a multi-tiered carnival of horrors, where different sins are punished with different means. Opportunists are forever stung by insects, the lustful are trapped in a storm, the greedy are forced to battle against each other, and the violent lie in a river of boiling blood, are transformed into thorn bushes, and are trapped on a volcanic desert.

If nothing else makes you feel like being good, then "The Inferno" might change your mind. The author loads up his "Inferno" with every kind of disgusting, grotesque punishment that you can imagine -- and it's all wrapped up in an allegorical journey of humankind's redemption, not to mention dissing the politics of Italy and Florence.

Along with Virgil -- author of the "Aeneid" -- Dante peppered his Inferno with Greek myth and symbolism. Like the Greek underworld, different punishments await different sins; what's more, there are also appearances by harpies, centaurs, Cerberus and the god Pluto. But the sinners are mostly Dante's contemporaries, from corrupt popes to soldiers.

And Dante's skill as a writer can't be denied -- the grotesque punishments are enough to make your skin crawl ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and the grand finale is Satan himself, with legendary traitors Brutus, Cassius and Judas sitting in his mouths. (Yes, I said MOUTHS, not "mouth")

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even pre-hell, we have a lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. And the punishments themselves usually reflect the person's flaws, such as false prophets having their heads twisted around so they can only see what's behind them. Wicked sense of humor.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative "inferno" makes this the most fascinating, compelling volume of the Divine Comedy. Never fun, but always spellbinding and complicated.

Infernal Translating.......2006-11-11

The Inferno of Dante is undoubtedly a book worth reading because of its historical influence and impressive poetry, but without a skilled translator the meaning or poetic form is lost. Robert Pinsky manages to find a perfect balance between Dante's message and style. Combined with notes that explain Dante's many historical references, this balance allows The Inferno of Dante to continue to be a great piece of literature. In order to maintain the necessary balance between Dante's message and style, Robert Pinsky uses a looser form of rhyming than most people use. He rhymes leads with sides and defer with there. Although these may not rhyme as well as heat and sheet, they have enough in common that they are able to demonstrate the rhythm of the tertiary rhyme in The Inferno of Dante. Pinsky's loose rhyming gives him more choices, which allow him to better preserve Dante's message.
This message, however, would be lost on today's readers if it were not for notes that help further translate the meaning of events within The Inferno of Dante. Most of the characters Dante meets along his journey have long been forgotten by the average reader. How many people would understand the significance of the name Bocca? Upon hearing this Dante says, "I have no further need to speak with you" (Pinsky 347). This leaves the reader completely clueless as to who Bocca was. This is remedied by using the notes Pinsky provides in his translation. These notes tell the reader that Bocca betrayed his party in battle causing their defeat (Pinsky 423).
This extra information is essential to Robert Pinsky's translation, which retains the amazing rhythm, beauty, and message that Dante designed.

Works Cited
Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and

Giroux, 1994.

Best book I've ever read.......2005-12-31

Ignore any negative reviews of this translation of Dante's Inferno. The only negative thing I can say is, after reading Pinsky's translation of Inferno, the non-Pinsky translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso were not so interesting by comparison (Mr. Pinsky! Please! Translate the other two books!).

Pinsky is a former U.S. Poet Laureate, so the few people here who bashed his work are in the minority.

Forget the boring rules of poetry you learned in high school. Read the introduction/prologue in which Pinsky explains the type of poetry Dante used and how Pinsky chose to follow that method. I then suggest you read the whole book twice. Read it once, stopping to check the end notes so you will know who the characters are and their importance in history, and their relevance to the story. Then read it again, with just an expectation of pure enjoyment.

Also, ignore the expectations of meter your high school teacher may have taught you (like mine did). Just read and follow punctutation, rather than the ends of the lines.

Doing these things allowed me to more fully enjoy Inferno, and I still marvel at the literary beauty produced some 700 years ago.

touring Hell in cargo pants.......2005-09-22

Pinsky has alighted on the translation solution that will eventually give rise to the definitive English Dante. Rather than forgo ryme altogether or force his English into perfect terza-rima, Pinsky employs slant rhyme. Pinsky calls his version Yeatsean, but of course other poets have embraced slant rhyme to great effect--Dickinson stands out for me.

But reading Pinsky's "Translator's Note" prepares you for the failings of his translation. For he has also aimed for a more compressed version, one with more enjambment, to convey something of Dante's own compression and, I suppose, swiftness. The problem arises in the very first tercet, where Dante spends three full lines on waking up lost in that dark wood. Pinsky dispenses with those lines in 18 syllables, then interrupts Dante's startling recollection at the end of the second line to rush the next tercet into the first one. The enjambent conceals the slant rhyme, mooting Pinsky's otherwise brilliant poetic solution, and also shucks the essential weight of Dante's opening. It reads like a prose translation, embarrased by even its own of-rhymes (which are actually a great idea!) and blasting through Dante's thought without recognizing Dante's own choices about end-stopping his thoughts more frequently. Unless English is 20 percent more efficient than Italian, or translators care for sense at the exclusion of the original's poetics, this book disappoints.

And it's a swift, compressed opening even at three full lines. Three lines--just three--for Dante to depict himself as spiritually waylaid: further compression simply detracts, and it dishonors the poem's already admirable economy, not just its efficiency but also how it chooses to spend each tercet, the careful filing of each one with this step or that in his journey, or to run over into the next tercet.

Pinsky's is a bilingual translation, allowing you to just visually register how much more ready he is than Dante to break Dante's thoughts before the end of a line and start Dante's next phrase or sentence with two or three or four syllables left. All that enjambment is perfectly natural to English poetry, maybe even to Italian, but the facing-page presentation of Dante's actual words reveal that Dante employed rhyme togeth with the regular ryhthm of the line-endings to generally honor his rhetoric.

That compression, by the way, makes most of the cantos radically shorter than Dante's own verse. Canto after canto is 20 to 30 lines short of Dante's Italian, and when a Canto is maybe 120 or 130 lines long, the translation becomes more like a discount version of Dante than an English Dante. Allen Mandelbaum, who translates into blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), offers the poem the dignity Dante's Italian merits. You can use the facing page Italian to see that. Dope out what those latinate words obviously mean, and see how much reordering and reduction Pinsky offers--here turning a descriptive phrase into a single adjective, there shrinking a long appositive or subordinate clause.

Pinsky's diction is more fluent, more readily grasped than other translations, but it often feels off-hand, hasty, artless, undramatic--a tour of Hell in cargo pants. The story still conveys its tone, but mostly through incident, not via Pinsky's poetry.

Average customer rating:

Something for everyone in poetry!
Absolutely lovely
"Americans' Favorite Poems" Is My Favorite Poetry Anthology!
Representative of Americans' taste in poetry?
Illustrates What Poetry is Really About

Americans' Favorite Poems

Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Reference Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
The Wise Woman and Other Stories (Fantasy Stories of George MacDonald)
The Story of Christianity
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

ASIN: 0393048209

Amazon.com

Americans' Favorite Poems offers keen proof that poetry does make something happen, that it can give strength and perspective, inspire and alter lives, and comfort and surprise. How did this grassroots golden anthology come about? When Robert Pinsky was named U.S. poet laureate in 1997, he hoped to persuade 100 Americans to recite and discuss their favorite works. Even he may have been surprised when thousands were moved to contribute and commune. From the wave of responses, Pinsky has selected 200 poems, each preceded by one or more testimonials. Make no mistake: this collection, ranging in alphabetical order from Ammons to Zagajewski, would be a keeper without any commentary whatsoever. But Pinsky's volume again and again makes clear that for real readers Matthew Arnold is far from outmoded, that people still thrill to Robert Browning, and that Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" is--at least for one Hollywood type--a reflection of reality rather than sublime whimsy. And how about John Donne's "The Flea"? A precocious Arizona 17-year-old deems it not a thorny metaphysical work but "the best argument for sex I've ever heard."

Fans will encounter their favorites, from Anna Akhmatova to Langston Hughes to W.B. Yeats, and read them anew in the light of people's passionate comments. But there are also discoveries to be made. A New Mexican treasures "Who Says Words with My Mouth" by the 13th-century Persian poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi: "I can't live without it and I can die with it." And this reader is grateful to one New Yorker for offering up Nazim Hikmet's "Things I Didn't Know I Loved." Twenty-four-year-old Chad Menville writes: "I identify with this poem about imprisonment, censorship, longing, and belief in oneself more than with any other poem I have read. This poem needs to be heard! Please."

Americans' Favorite Poems really is a national portrait: those who took up Pinsky's challenge range from teachers to prisoners, teenagers to nonagenarians. There are even a few artists. Violinist and conundrum merchant Laurie Anderson sent a long, complex paragraph detailing how George Herbert inspired her to create a talking table: "It compressed the sound and drove it up steel rods so that when you sat with your elbows on the table and your hands to your ears, it was like wearing a pair of powerful headphones." And when it comes to A.E. Housman, the writer William Maxwell opted for simplicity with the sentence fragment: "Because I cannot read it without shuddering with pleasure." That same phrase can be applied to the entire volume. Robert Pinsky's vision is inspiring on every level, proof of his belief in poetry--and people. --Kerry Fried

Book Description

This anthology embodies Robert Pinsky's commitment to discover America's beloved poems, his special undertaking as Poet Laureate of the United States. The selections in this anthology were chosen from the personal letters of thousands of Americans who responded to Robert Pinsky's invitation to write to him about their favorite poems. Some poems are memories treasured in the mind since childhood; some crystallize the passion of love or recall the trail of loss and sorrow. The poems and poets in this anthology--from Sappho to Lorca, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glck, and Allen Ginsberg--are poems to be read aloud and memorized, poems to be celebrated as part of our nation's cultural inheritance. Accompanying the poems are comments by people who speak not as professional critics but as passionate readers of various ages, professions and regions. This anthology, in a manner unlike any other, discloses the rich and vigorous presence of poetry in American life at the millennium and provides a portrait of the United States through the lens of poetry. The Favorite Poem Project is an official part of the Bicentennial Celebration of the Library of Congress and the White House Millennium Council.

Customer Reviews:

Something for everyone in poetry!.......2005-09-27

This is a great sampler of all the wonderful poets of all times and represents all the different types of poetry. It is a journey into the past as well as the present. What a pleasure to read and share with others.

Absolutely lovely.......2004-09-06

I personally prefer poem anthologies where the poetry is from a mix of poets, not just a collection of one poet's work. Americans' Favorite Poems will give you some very famous favorites, and also might surprise you with the works of lesser known (but still wonderful) writers.

What I also loved about this treasure of a book was the comments. Robert Pinsky compiled the poems that people from around the US sent him and printed their comments as to why each poem was their favorite. Reading the comments of all these people - firefighters, students, forest rangers, doctors, homemakers, basically people from all walks of life - is often very moving, entertaining, or surprising (you'll see some of your best loved poems from new and delightful angles). You get a feel for why people love poems as they explain that love, that attachment to a particular poem, in their own words.

"Americans' Favorite Poems" Is My Favorite Poetry Anthology!.......2003-07-17

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project. Since its inception, the Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives. During a one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems - Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, education and backgrounds. The Project's first anthology, "Americans' Favorite Poems," consists of 200 of the submitted poems, along with readers' comments about their attachments to the poems. The selections are by poets from all over the world, poems written centuries ago alongside contemporary poems, poignantly sad poetry, as well as spiritually uplifting works, and humorous poems. Many are translations.

I found so many of my own favorites in this extraordinary collection. I was also introduced to many wonderful new poems, I might never have read. And some of the comments from the folks who submitted the poems, are as moving as the poetry itself. The book emphasizes the pure joy of reading poetry. And poetry appreciation is alive and well in America!

There is Anna Akhmatova's "The Sentence," submitted by a woman from Georgia who remembers her brother "who returned from Vietnam, a broken man of 21," when reading this poem; and Margaret Atwood's "Variation On The Word Sleep," "the most beautiful love poem I have ever read," writes a woman from Queens, NY; Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky" is included, with the comment, "Where else can you find a tale of danger, adventure, triumph, and jubilation - all so utterly wrapped in nonsense?" There are wonders printed here, by Ranier Marie Rilke, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Allan Ginsberg...and so many more. It must have been a difficult task, indeed, to select 200 poems from so many worthy submissions.

I recommend this anthology to poetry lovers everywhere, and also to those who do not care for poetry. This collection may change your mind.

Representative of Americans' taste in poetry?.......2002-07-13

I wonder. I doubt it since Maya Angelou isn't included. She's one of the most visible poets in America today and very much loved. It's not that she's little known because she was America's Poet Laureate a few years ago -- so why leave her out? And why only one poem by William Stafford? Also, clearly one of the universal favorites of Robert Frost's is "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and it's not here, either. (That one shows up in almost any discussion of poetry.)And, only one poem by Robert Penn Warren, another former USA Poet Laureate?
[sigh]

I'm also suspicious of a "project" that doesn't seem to have been announced widely before it began -- it can't be representative of ALL Americans since all Americans obviously didn't know about it.

All that said, it's a great collection. Through it I met several new poets (new to me)and I certainly enjoyed the ones I was already familiar with. It made me curious, too, about just what the American taste in poetry truly would be. I suspect it would include Ogden Nash and Edgar Allen Poe.

No. I don't think it's representative of the poetic taste of the American public and I don't think it should claim to be so, but I do think it's a great overview of popular poets and a superb collection of poems.

Illustrates What Poetry is Really About.......2001-07-31

Americans' Favorite Poems is an amazing book. It is the result of the "favorite poem project" held across the nation. The poems in the collection are real Americans' favorites along with their own comments on why they chose that poem as their favorite. The compilation is great for the obvious. The poems selected come from everywhere (many different cultures and different styles of poetry are present), and they are outstanding. The thing that sets Americans' Favorite Poems apart from other collections is the commentary from regular people. The comments are at turns hilarious and moving. They are always profound. They show the real greatness of good poetry: it has the ability to relate to a person's life experiences and really touch that person.

Book Description

A visual tribute to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, this book offers a snapshot in time of a university 235 years young. Images span the geographic scope of the University's three campuses in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick, providing an armchair tour of one of America's leading educational institutions.

This remarkable portrait of Rutgers-evocative, amusing, informative, and exuberant-is drawn from the narrative of three overlapping journeys. The longest spans nearly two and a half centuries and traces the University's evolution from a colonial college established to train young men for the ministry, to its land-grant designation in the mid-nineteenth century, to its current status as New Jersey's state university and a distinguished center for learning and research. The second journey is the quest for knowledge and achievement that faculty and students have shared since classes were first held in the mid-eighteenth century. Then, a single instructor and his handful of charges gathered to study in a former New Brunswick tavern. Today, a third journey travels the diverse paths of more than fifty thousand students and faculty each year, and starts on one of three major campuses throughout the state. A visit to each of them as the seasons change in the course of an academic year completes this Rutgers album.

The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
Average customer rating:

phenomenal!

solid, solid work

Pinsky

Metaphysical Poetry for the people

The dire one, the desired one . . .

The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
United States | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Pinsky, Robert | ( P ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Jersey Rain: Poems

New and Selected Poems 1974-2004

Wild Gratitude

An Explanation of America (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Star Dust: Poems

ASIN: 0374525064

Amazon.com

Katha Pollitt writes that these are "extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful poems." Pinsky is a respected critic and translator and, as a poet, is a genius of sound and lineation. He also excels at the startling image, as when he describes a brain as "humming to itself, / Like a fat person eating M&Ms in the bathtub." The vividness of the image grabs our attention even as its poignancy and cruel edge complicate the tone of this intricate poem ("History of My Heart"). An impressive and moving collection.

Book Description

The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes Pinsky's renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of his award-winning version of the Inferno.

Customer Reviews:

phenomenal!.......2006-04-07

This is one of the best books of poetry I've ever read. I personally own over 100 books of poetry, including anthologies and I can say, without a doubt, this may be one of the best books written in modern times and certainly in our lifetime.

solid, solid work.......2003-05-01

I guess his work is so controversial because it's so thoroughly formalist in a time of experimentation. He is a very feeling person, a poet of feeling & great genius. He addresses all sorts of themes in these poems. All sorts, from the serenely bucolic [he sometimes begins poems by showing the reader that he's been sure to learn things about what he uses for images) to overtly sexual experiments that he says in the poem make you feel dirty. In one he muses about philosophy in general, which he declares as a poet is not his field, not quite, as nothing can stop the poet from thinking (no matter how much exile that means, I must add)but the thinking of poetry is be for poetry.

He is a very important poet. He was honored with the distinction of U.S. poet laureate three times in a row -- the first ever to be three times in a row -- because he's done more work for the vitality of poetry than almost any other person alive, matched or nearly matched by very few. In his scholarship, he studies everything so intently. In his writing, he channels the world through an equally unsparing dedication to mastery.

Pinsky.......2001-03-23

Here began the death of all substantial poets.

Metaphysical Poetry for the people.......2000-10-01

In contrast to, say, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, or Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky's poetry is practically unknown among literary circles in Europe. I guess it is Pinsky's variety both in tone and subject matter, which make him hard to place, and maybe even more, his obviously positive attitude towards life and ordinary people, which make it impossible for him ever to become the darling of European intellectuals.

Writing a long poem called "An Explanation of America" makes it look as if Pinsky wanted to place himself in the tradition of Whitman. And there is something Whitmanesque (?) in the sheer width of Pinsky's concerns - in contrast to contemporaries who dig in the same ground over and over again, Pinsky's imagination tries to encompass the variousness of what's going on around him and in his mind. Just flicking through the table of contents will show you that "Jesus and Isolt" or "The New Saddhus" sit comfortably side by side with what seems like childhood memoirs. Pinsky's humour and sense of irony are a far cry from Whitman, however, and so is his stylistic variety which matches the one of his concerns.

The Pinsky I like best is the one of the rather short, unpretentious poems like "The Beach Women". Here, the speaker recalls his youthful fascination with thirtyish women in the 50s:
"On those days I admired their tans, white dresses, / And pink oval fingernails on brown hands, and sold them / Perfume and lipstick, aspirins, throat lozenges and Tums, / Tampax, newspapers an paperback books - brave stays / Against boredom, discomfort, death and old age."

Other poems may seem daunting by the learnedness they display or by the whimsy of their conceits (I guess that is what put off some of the readers here), but I can only advise you to come back to those poems again - Pinsky's are poems you will not forget; and the more you are familiar with his poetry, the more you will appreciate it.

If Pinsky starts in a Whitmanesque vein ("possible to feel briefly like Jesus, / A gust of diffuse tenderness"), he is honest enough to go on: "But how love falters and flags / When anyone's difficult eyes come / Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique / Soul, its need unlovable" - but he does not leave it at that either. Find out for yourself!

The dire one, the desired one . . ........2000-03-16

"~Pinsky is one of my favorite contemporary American poets. He has most certainly not forgotten that SOUND is essential to all poetry, and the sounds of his lines are truly hypnotic. money.

Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series)

Average customer rating:

Important Statement about the place of poetry in America
yo, chek it
The Heat of Middle Water
A great short read
Too Big a Picture of "Him"

Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series)
Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Qualifying Textbooks - Spring 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Poetry And The World
An Explanation of America (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)
The Situation of Poetry
Jersey Rain: Poems
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

ASIN: 0691096171

Book Description

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.

There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.

As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.

Customer Reviews:

Important Statement about the place of poetry in America.......2005-10-11

Poetry is not aristocratic in America--but rather personal and cultural at the same time. Pinsky jumps right into the discussion of culture and the so called "culture wars," and shows us all the many ways in which our poetry is a public expression of deep knowing and the inner voice. His takeoff point is Alexis de Tocqueville's description of American life as lacking in poetic quality in Democracy in America. Americans, Tocqueville maintains, will focus not on the heroic actions of aristocratic poetry, but on the natural features of the landscape and the interior feelings, emotions and makeup of the individual person. Pinsky sees this observation as prescient of what our poetry eventually has turned out to be. He sees America's poetry as a poetry of shared memory--shared and socialized through the human voice.

The human voice of the poem as read aloud is the actual instrument, for Pinsky, of culture--making men and women social beings. This, of course, is the genius of Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, which has generated two anthologies to date and a video archive of the social moments of America's poetic voices as brought to life by ordinary Americans.

He provides special insights into the "skewed quatrains and secular hymns" of Emily Dickinson (one of my favorite poets)and Walt Whitman's project (partly a failure and partly a success) to fashion himself into the persona of a great national bard.

This is one of the best descriptions of poetic "voice" that you will ever find. Pinsky himself has the credentials for it, given his own remarkable body of poems, his translations of Dante's Inferno and now his new book on David--perhaps one of the greatest models for all poetry.

If you write or read poetry, this is a book you will resonate with.

yo, chek it.......2003-10-13

as a poet, critic, and as poet laureate, a literary activist, pinsky as bin a significant force in recent efforts to comprehend relationships betweun american poetry and culture. dis volume summarizes is efforts to "consida da voice of poetry [...] within da culture of american democracy, amid da tensions of pluralism." although marxists and post-structuralists will likely check da unquestioned umanism implicit in pinsky's ruk suspect, he nevertheless offers pragmatic ruks fa situatin poetry's cultural and political role in american society and fa understandin da social value of private art. he emphasizes ow da diverse characta of america as led to a "fantastic" experience of memory dat "exaggetares da anxieties of uniformity and memory" in a nevertheless positive role of resistance to da "apparently total successes" of colonitazion. poetry's function in da process of cultural memory borrows a bodily quality to da "solitary voice" and defends uman-scale perceptions and judgments from da levelin effects of mass-scale culture. fa pinsky, da "solitude of lyric [...] invokes a social presence." integral, is poetry's intrinsic vocality, creatin a force dat "origitanes within da reada" but "gestures outward" to "alert us to da presence of anotha or udders." thus poetry, though inherently personal, is nevertheless "far from solipsistic" in its invocation of audience. pinsky distinguishes dis outward-reaching interiority from more performative arts such as drama, tunes, and slam, and stresses it as poetry's source of endurin strengf. efforts to transform poetry into performance, from dis view, doom it to irrelevance coz of its inability to compete wiv da influence of da entertainment industry. as an essentially socially-based convention, poetry's formal qualities also play an outward-reaching role in its social praxis, but unlike da more apocalyptic proclatamions of formalists dig dana gioia, pinsky's calm advancement of a theory of form's function avoids reductively polarized (form versus free verse) polemics and thus supports a broada endorsement of da genre's social efficacy. although far from comprehensive, pinsky offers a teachable counterpoint to more dire political assessments from bof da right and left wings of da poetry wars.

The Heat of Middle Water.......2002-12-31

Sober, judicious, temperate, suave, Pinsky considers poetry's place in our high-tech democracy with all the passion of a required civics course. Nary an insight will trouble anyone's sleep in NPR, MacNeill/Lehrer America, and that's a shame, because poetry at its best is a whole lot hotter than that. Pinsky's a deft explainer and he keeps his good-natured balance in the midst of a very fragmented field. But I think those qualities mitigate against the kind of fire we need to shake poetry loose from the warm academic middle, whose virtues and limitations Pinksy embodies in every line of his prose.

A great short read.......2002-10-04

Short, punchy, and nicely designed. Pinsky doesn't waste words. If you want to read a modern manifesto in defence of poetry, this is it. It's easy to dump on Pinsky because he's in the public eye so much, but this at least shows he's there because he has a brain. And who can complain about a poet being a star?

Too Big a Picture of "Him".......2002-09-28

Pinsky should take some time out to rest his ego and perhaps he will get back to thinking seriously about poetry rather than himself. "Jersey Rain" was bad, but this very small book with very big type is worse. The Narcissist is definitely in.

Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Average customer rating:

A most noteworthy collection
"Bring me the sunflower crazy with the light..."

Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Americans' Favorite Poems
An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Committed to Memory
Good Poems
Good Poems for Hard Times

ASIN: 0393010740

Book Description

A unique anthology by the editors of the bestseller Americans' Favorite Poems. Poems to Read is a welcoming avenue into poetry for readers new to poetry, including high school and college students. It is also meant to be a fresh, valuable collection for readers already devoted to the art. This anthology concentrates on the actual pleasures of reading poems: hearing the poem in your voice, bringing it to other people, musing about it, taking excitement or comfort from it, wandering with it or—as in the Keats letter quoted in the Introduction—having it as a starting post. Many of these 200 poems are accompanied by comments from readers of various ages, regions, and backgrounds who participated in the Favorite Poem Project. Included are poems by John Donne, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, and Louise Glück, to name a few. The editors offer their own comments on some of the poems, which are arranged in thematic chapters.

Customer Reviews:

A most noteworthy collection.......2003-05-09

Even more than the many fine poems cited in this wonderful anthology, I enjoyed the eloquent responses by everyday Americans as to why they responded in certain ways to their favorite poems. These stories are almost as moving as the actual poems and there are dozens of terrific poems, both the familiar and the unexpectedly novel. If you only read the comments, you'd be a richer person, but to read the comments along with the poems, now that's an experience. If this book were required in English classes around the country, maybe kids wouldn't resent poetry units so much!

"Bring me the sunflower crazy with the light...".......2003-04-02

I am absolutely blown away by the quality of this anthology! Absolutely blown away. Organized by the people behind the Favorite Poem Project ... this beautiful book strikes the perfect poetic balance; the poems here have depth and meaning, but they are never impenetrable and are always a joy to read aloud.

The mainstays are all here: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman, Keats, Frost, etc., but the book often presents their lesser-known works (such as a terrific Langston Hughes piece called "Life is Fine" that I'd somehow missed). There are also more obscure poets; May Swenson, Derek Walcott, and many international writers. But what makes this book truly unique is the commentary printed above most of the poems sent in by people of all ages and professions.

Students, teachers, doctors, writers; they talk about their favorite poems with great love and a sense of awe. Their passion is infectious. I plan to buy this book, but instead of sitting on my bookshelf like my other poetry books it will go in my backpack to be with me wherever I go, for anytime I need a breath of fresh air. Highly recommended.
GRADE: A

Poetry And The World
Average customer rating:
Poetry And The World
Robert Pinsky
Manufacturer: Ecco
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | British | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Pinsky, Robert | ( P ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Situation of Poetry

An Explanation of America (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series)

History of My Heart: Poems

ASIN: 088001217X

Book Description

A collection of sharp, entertaining, and informative essays by poet Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World is a passionate inquiry into poetry's place in the modem world. Combining the arts of criticism and autobiography, Pinsky writes about poets as diverse as Walt VVhitman and Philip Freneau, Marianne Moore and Frank O'Hara, about a visit to Poland during the early days of Solidarity, and his own childhood in a seedy New Jersey resort town. The scope and diversity of these essays confirm Pinsky's stature as not only one of our best poets, but as a perceptive and engaging critic as well.

Authors:

Authors

Authors