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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!