National Poetry Month: Books about poetry

Don't read poetry : a book about how to read poems / Stephanie Burt.

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

A Poetry Handbook

"Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that's what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook."--Los Angeles Times From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry. With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver's prolific mind--a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

On Modern Poetry

All too often, the history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is told as a tale of two sides. While 'Lit crit' pored over the author's every line, 'Theory' stood on the shoulder of texts to gaze into the metaphysical mists. Drawing on the key insights of both Lit crit and Theory, On Modern Poetry tries to get beyond the opposition between them, proposing instead a 'total criticism' that draws on all resources available. It combines 'analytic irony' with 'imaginative empathy' in order to generate fresh insights. The themes discussed in the first part of the book include tradition, voice, rhyme, rhetoric, and objects, bringing in critics such as Eliot, Heidegger, Empson, Blackmur, and De Man. The second part examines texts by Tennyson, Symons, Hopkins, Larkin and Prynne. An original exploration of poetry and its criticism, On Modern Poetry is an essential guide for readers and students at all levels.

Attention Equals Life

The book argues that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even method of resistance, to a culture gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism, why it has so often led to unusual, challenging projects and formal innovation, and why poetry, in particular, might be an everyday-life genre par excellence.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012)

Poetry Writers' Handbook

The making of a poem : a Norton anthology of poetic forms / edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

The anthology uses example and explanation to demonstrate the excitement and entertainment of various poetic forms, including the sonnet, the ode, the elegy and the pastoral. Included are essays by the editors describing their own personal journeys to a form for their poetic voice. Above all this anthology shows that poetic form is a continuing adventure. Poetic form is illustrated not as a series of rules but as a passionate conversation in which every reader can become involved.