Books on How to Read Poetry

Best books on reading poetry - books you can use without paying the big bucks for an MFA program:

How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch. (1999, 0-15-100419-6)

Delightful. Recommended.
Hirsch presents poems that he cares deeply about, and that are "emblematic because they suggest something crucial about the nature of poetry itself." Hirsch writes, "I have listened hard and let the poems inhabit me. This book is a record of my initiations, encounters, responses, experiences. It is a record of my exaltations."

Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch. (1998, 0-684-82438-8)

Lucid and enthralling book on the pleasures of reading and writing poetry. Koch celebrates the idea of poetry as a separate language, and thereby clarifies how poems are written and can be read. Entrancing selection of poems from Sappho (7th century B.C.) through Li Bai (8th century C.E.) to Arthur Rimbaud (19th century), plus many modern poems.

Koch's own remarkable One Train May Hide Another (1994) is one of the finest modern poems - it still takes away my breath. About "One Train," his publisher (Knopf) says "it is both a treatise on how to read poetry and an awareness-heightening celebration of the hidden and the unexpected." Koch died on July 6th, 2002. His publisher also says, "Koch was not just a prolific poet, but a teacher of poetry, both in his years as a professor at Columbia and in the projects he undertook to open poetry to readers of all ages and backgrounds."

Also recommended:

• The Sounds of Poetry, Robert Pinsky.
  (1998, 0-374-26695-6)
  A precious gem-stone of a book - small and iridescent. Pinsky's goal is "to show ways to hear more of what poems accomplish, and thereby to take more pleasure in them." I love to read an American Poet Laureate who begins his section on Theory with, "There are no rules."

  However, he continues, "principles may be discerned in ... the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or abandoned."

  Also of great importance is Pinsky's observation, "No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem."

• A Poet's Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie.
  (1999, 0-226-43739-6)
  Kinzie's solid and well-grounded 561-page book looks a little hefty and daunting. But as one anonymous reviewer remarks, "not so hard to understand as the numbers of pages might suggest."

  The first third of the book discusses and illustrates six "Elements of Relation and Resemblance," namely the line, syntax, diction, trope, rhetoric, and rhythm. Like Molly Peacock, Kinzie explores how lines and sentences work with and against each other.

  The middle third concerns syllable and stress. It includes a chapter on "the four freedoms of free verse," which makes some sense of what sometimes seems to be the anarchy of free verse.

  The final third contains exercises for writing in form, together with a large glossary and an annotated bibliography.

• How to Read a Poem, Burton Raffel.
  (1984, 0-452-00682-1)
  An informative introduction to poetry, full of over 200 examples of poems, together with commentaries on them. Discusses how poetry works (its music and other approaches and techniques), the devices that it uses (rhyme, repetition, etc.), and the shapes, structures, and metrics of poetry. Copies of this useful, vintage book can often be found in second-hand bookshops.

• How to Read a Poem ... and Start a Poetry Circle, Molly Peacock.
  (1999, ISBN 1-57322-128-7) [Out of print - find it in libraries and bookshops.]
  Peacock is refreshing in her awareness of the pitfalls of over-analyzing poetry: "There's a whole specialized vocabulary people hurl about when poems are on the examining table. But with a talisman poem ... we can avoid autopsies as a way of understanding." Peacock describes and illustrates (using 13 of her favorite poems) her three systems - the line, the sentence, and the image - that help you appreciate the music, ideas, and sensual pictures of the poems that you love.

Related pages: Poetry index. Books on How to Read. Books on How to Write. How to Listen. How to Write - A Recipe.

How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka.

Books of Poetry Form.

Copyright © 2002-2017 by J. Zimmerman.

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