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.
She dispels preconceptions about poetry, explains how poems speak
to one another, and how they can speak to our lives. It shows
readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like,
and how to connect the poetry of the past to poetry of the present.
Unlike other guides, Burt does not approach poetry chronologically,
or by school, form, or poet. Instead, her book moves through six
reasons to read poetry. These include "feeling and attitude," or
how poems can embody, reflect, and share emotions, and "difficulty
and frustration," or how poets present us with problems and let us
see the world anew. Each chapter explores the theme through the
works of various poets and their histories. Burt moves seamlessly
from the "classics" - Sappho, Wordsworth, Plath &c - to poetry
circulated in Riot Grrrl fanzines or on Twitter. She challenges the
assumptions that most people make about "poetry," whether they
think they like it or think they don't (it's all old; it's all
incomprehensible; it's sappy, or soppy; it's lovely; it's
uplifting; it's good if it's in the New Yorker; it can't be good if
it's in the New Yorker) in order to help us cherish-and distinguish
among-individual poems. If the book has one governing argument,
it's this: Don't read "poetry"; read poems. Burt seeks to fill a
gap by providing a book that, while suitable for course adoption,
is written for the average trade reader. Don't Read Poetry stands
apart from other books as well in the sheer range of forms
considered (from aubades to zeugma-based, Twitter-friendly
epigrams), and the timeline covered. For the first time, Burt will
take full account of new styles of poetry from the past few
decades-poetry dependent on the digital environment, for example,
or on practices imported from gallery art, from radical social
thought (CAConrad, or books from Ugly Duckling Presse), or the
culture and language of Korean, and Native, and Chinese, and
Latina/o/x, Americans, from Carter Revard to the current U.S Poet
Laureate. Destined to become a classic, Don't Read Poetry is the
perfect book for anyone confronting poetry for the first time, but
also has much to teach the those fully immersed in the genre.
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