The best Poetry Literary Criticism books: Reddit reviews

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The John Ciardi one.

It keeps the original rhyming structure, which must have been really hard to do when translating from Italian to English. It isn't really rigid English like some of the other translations that can make your brain get tired after reading for a while. And most importantly it has notes for each chapter. Dante himself is the main character, and he writes in a bunch of actual people from in and around Italy during his lifetime, so reading the notes really helps understand a lot of the references to people/places/things in the book. I just read the notes before I read each chapter so I knew as I read it what was going on.

Thanks so much! This is all uber useful. I know what I'll be reading this evening! So that's your personal blog, of sorts?

This is the copy of the Poetic Edda I was looking at. I'm not sure if that one is the "revised" edition.

Some excellent advice on how to write poetry, which is, after all, what you asked about!

Here's something to put in the pile next to it, some thoughts on becoming a poet. I mean that in a very broad way, after all I am only occasionally a poet of sorts and barely even then, so I hardly speak with professional expertise. Anyway:

Some steps to becoming a poet:

1. Stop, in all sorts of moments.
2. Sip the world, inhale the world, gulp it down. All are important tastings.
3. Sit your mind outside and high above it all. See how things connect, what separates them and what moves them together and apart.
4. Practice letting your thoughts and your feelings sit in the palm of your hand, so you can gently turn them over and around and around, knowing them better from all sides
5. Listen, a lot. Touch, and be touched. Watch without words.
6. Learn endlessly about words, their insides (grammar and linguistics) and their outsides (how they connect)
7. Spend time with visual art and music. Rhythm and space are particularly important in free verse.
8. Write a lot of poems about things that don't matter to you, so that your craft is ready for the things that do.
9. Ask for this: https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Handbook-Mary-Oliver/dp/0156724006 for your birthday, Christmas or other gift receiving occasion, if you're fortunate to have people who would get it for you.
10. Have a life well suited and well lived.

This one? I didn't know of this, thanks! I read (or rather am reading) the penguin version, which thankfully also has a fuckton of footnotes.

Yeah, thankfully the version I have is full of annotations explaining the symbolism and references.

I think this is the one I have (from Amazon). ISBN 978-0-451-20863-7

I honestly think I enjoyed Purgatorio more than Inferno, probably mostly because I love the idea of redemption and purification and the imagery of angels.

I see you're asking for novels, but what are your feelings on reading poetry for this purpose?

I ask, because I once had a period of about 2 years when I had a lot of problems sleeping due to anxiety and racing thoughts that wouldn't shut up, and I found reading (and especially memorizing) poetry was an effective way of quieting my brain. It was stimulating enough to give my attention something to latch onto besides the nonsense screaming in my head, but not so stimulating that I'd become engrossed in a poem and have to stay up all night finishing it. In fact, the more dry and boring the poem was, the better (Alexander Pope, I salute you).

Just to clarify -- I do read poetry and enjoy it, but when I was reading it at night to quiet my brain, it wasn't for the enjoyment of the content of the poems, but for the (uh) literal act of reading it. The language of poetry (esp that written before the 20th century) is unusual and challenging to parse, so it takes some concentration to read, which siphons away mental resources away from those obsessive thoughts. That's also where memorization is useful -- it takes even more concentration to memorize, and in return, you build up a stockpile of poems you can mentally recite at any time you want to derail a thought spiral.

And of course, so many of those poems are really beautiful, and powerful, and voice sentiments that affirm life and one's place in it.

Anyway, if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend any big honking anthology of poems, like the Norton Anthology, which is (*checks listing*) a whopping 2,182 pages long and 6 inches thick and could provide years of refuge from The Night Terrors.

You might like Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language which is an entire book revolving around the fuzziness of language and the difficulty of translation, due to how polymorphic language is. Too bad it's Hofstadter's worst received book.

Me, I liked Metamagical Themas. It's a handful of short snippets into fun playful topics. Not as deep as GEB, but more playful and easier to digest.

That is absolutely going to happen. The depth and nuance on this show. Soon, it’ll be listed here for great minds to ponder:

https://www.amazon.com/Popular-Culture-and-Philosophy-125-book-series/dp/B0897GS1YK

it is worth bearing in mind that the havamal shouldnt be taken as a perfect piece or perfect rules to follow - a lot of it is (understandably) outdated and theres a considerable amount of awful things written about women in there. its best taken as helpful suggestions and not mandatory commandments you should unquestioningly live by. parts of it are definitely more helpful and applicable than others.

i have this copy of the poetic edda and its beautiful.

I am currently reading aversion translated by John Ciardi, and it’s easier to understand than I expected. There are some phrases that are more flowery or oblique, but I just read them carefully.

The start of every Canto has a summary of what you’re about to read, the text of the Canto, then footnotes that explain references in the text or idioms of the region & time. I haven’t even needed to read the summaries because the translation is easy enough to understand. I’m barely into the Inferno, but if you’re looking for accessible, I can recommend this one.

For the sake of writing poetry, introducing yourself to its various forms (classical and more contemporary), and finding excellent examples of those forms, I highly encourage this particular Norton text edited Mark Strand.

I was absolutely NOT a poetry person until my creative writing professor who taught poetry writing introduced our class to this book. I have since begun incorporating it into my own creative writing curriculum as a high school teacher. It works wonders with my young writers, and I’ve seen many of them flourish with it.

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393321789/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_D0CW5F5X9A4R07YRS72C

If you are a newbie and a fan of stuff, there's a series called "Pop Culture and Philosophy" that starts with some pretty famous properties and discusses some ideas related to those.

http://www.amazon.com/Popular-Culture-and-Philosophy-125-book-series/dp/B0897GS1YK?ref=dbs_m_mng_awm_0000_ext

>translating directly will give me more of a french perspective instead of looking at the language trough an english lense, am I correct?

No. The best way to get "a French (mother-tongue speaker's) perspective" is through doing the French as it is, in the moment, directly, without any kind of translation or intermediation at all. No English lens, no Albanian lens, no Swahili or Mandarin lens -- it's just what it is. That's true for songs, poetry, novels, or day-to-day speech.

If you really want to get into issues of philosophy or linguistics about translation theory, instead of just figuring out how better to speak and grok French, then maybe you might want to check out Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas Hoftstadter.

You need this book immediately! When I was earning my BfA in CW, poetry was a significant weakness for me, too. I had a professor teach us forms. We read analyzed and discussed even more contemporary examples of the forms covered by this book. That was super helpful to me.

Now, I’m a HS teacher of English and Creative Writing, and I use this book when I teach poetry units. I even once used it to help this young hip hop artist in one of my classes discover some new structures for lyrical expression that he later applied in his music writing, and he remains of the few kids I’ve ever seen pull off a successful sestina.

And if you are taking a college poetry workshop class, I’d be less concerned about the writing and more concerned about the workshop portion. Any good workshop teacher is grading you not on your initial draft. They are grading you on the progress you make incorporating feedback into your revisions, and on the quality of the feedback you are giving your peers on their manuscripts and in the workshop.

Keep pushing, and read more examples of you need to.

Oh! And the second link is to Poetry Foundation in case you haven’t been to it before. You can used the advanced search to search for specific themes or forms in poetry.

The Making of a Poem: Norton Anthology of Poetic FormThe Making of A Poem: Norton’s Anthology of A Poem

Poetry Foundation poetry foundation

I honestly enjoy this and I'm warmed by your hope at the end. You know the future exists and there will be more sunsets so you're hopeful to see them without expectations of something better but equal beauty. Your message is clear and wonderful.

Try reading A Poetry Handbook for poetic struct. It may be Google's first suggestion but it actually seems like quite a good one.

I’m so glad you’re interested in looking more into poetry! From your post I would highly recommend reading a book called Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder. It’s a pretty popular book so you should be able to find it used or at a Barnes and noble. He does an amazing job of going at poetry with a new approach, explaining what it can do for us and why it’s important, and ways it can be more accessible to people who say they don’t understand poetry.

From amazon: Product description An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.

Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.

Here’s the link to buy it on amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Poetry-Matthew-Zapruder/dp/0062343076

"Why Poetry" by Matthew Zapruder. I'm in the middle of it now. It's contemporary, fairly new, I think. I highly recommend it! (though preferably not from Amazon...just the easiest way to show you a link! :)

The Making of a Poem: The Norton anthology of Poetic Forms is an invaluable read.

Otherwise, read poetry; writers read several times more than they write.

The Poetry Foundation website is a great place to start.

This book is straight fire for that The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393321789/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_O8vMCbZGZ7604 I am so pissed at myself that I lent it out and never got it back

My favorite poetry book that I take everywhere is The Making of a Poem. It's a Norton Anthology and it's amazing. Honestly recommend reading it cover to cover if you want a foundation in traditional forms.

It's currently 15 bucks on Amazon!

mhmm. u cn buy a copy of this for $26 USD, it's got all kinds of poems in there. otherwise just torrent a copy and read through it, real easy. gl

Why Poetry, By Matthew Zapruder.

(A) I can't fully vouch for this book, haven't read it thru and thru yet.

(B) I just picked it up literally 2 days ago.

(C) In the bookstore though, the flap, intro and a few random samplings seemed to make it a reasonable read.

He doesnt' take on an acedemic stance about rhyme and meter and iambic pentameters etc, but talks more about how we tend to read poems, how we've culturally beeen trained to read poems, and offers some strategy on how to break down the language and motifs.

So it seems.

That's all I got for you.

To follow your nose and to be prepared to read anything is good advice. Something really crazy like the Norton Anthology of Poetry (huge book, biblical proportions, designed for undergraduates) is the kind of deep pool that you can dive into more or less at random. Enjoy your reading!

I think that you could try two different approaches: You'll always have the recommendation of one poem or the other, (for which purpose I'd recommend my favorite, The Funeral, by John Donne, or you can go through a poet, one collection at a time.

For that purpose I'd recommend reading and supporting poets by purchasing their books: my favorite go-tos at the moment are Carol Ann Duffy's collections, 'Rapture' and 'The World's Wife', or collections from Sylvia Plath (or made post-mortem).

If you want particular structures however, I've been enjoying the read of the The Making of a Poem - It's always fun to try out a style/format/structure, and the introduction, in my opinion is a fantastic read as well.

Good luck!

Mary Oliver has an excellent guide for writing poetry:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Poetry-Handbook-Mary-Oliver/dp/0156724006

Edit: Also, join workshops. You learn a lot by critiquing other people's work.

This edition with notes and introduction by Philip Pullman looks pretty good.

Douglas Hofstadter treats this subject among related other subjects of the form "When is X really X?" in his books. I believe Le Ton Beau de Marot is the best one as far as the topic of death is concerned.

But basically, the atoms are irrelevant since they move through our bodies throughout our lives, and individual atoms don't have identities anyway. It makes more sense to ask whether or not the representations of us in people's minds, in recordings, etc. can be seen as an afterlife of sorts. And then, does Ben Franklin (about whom there exists much posthumous recollection) have more of an afterlife than some other random person of his time?

Agreed. along with a many other considerations. Lots about that aspect of lyrical translation in this book. http://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268618003&sr=1-1