I was rereading parts of Robert Pinsky's Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. The "singing school" of his title comes from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium"
Can you learn to be a poet by studying poems? It might help, but no. But you can certainly learn about poetry and how to read poems.
The collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Pinsky emphasizes ways to learn from great work. There are 80 poems and Pinsky's introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works.
This is the close study of poems, which I have done in workshops. He notes William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for its intense verbal music. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for its wild imagination in matter-of-fact language. He directs us to Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for "surrealist aplomb." Observe the subtle meter in Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.”
Robert Pinsky is a fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum. His books include At the Foundling Hospital, a best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante, and in prose The Life of David, on the Biblical figure, and his Selected Poems. His autobiography is Jersey Breaks.
Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate met such enthusiastic national response that he was appointed to an unprecedented third term. As Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of American readers, of varying backgrounds, ages, and regions, read their favorite poems. The videos at favoritepoem.org show that poetry has a vigorous presence in American culture.
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