How to Read (and Write About) Poetry invites students and others curious about poetry to join the critical conversation about a genre many find a little mystifying, even intimidating. In an accessible, engaging manner, this book introduces the productive questions, reading strategies, literary terms, and secondary research tips that will empower readers to participate in literary analysis. Holbrook explicates a number of meaty poems, initiating readers into critical discourse while highlighting key poetic terms. These useful terms are fully defined in a glossary at the back of the book. The explications are followed by selections of related works, so the book thus offers what amounts to a brief anthology, ideal for a poetry unit or introductory class on poetry and poetics. Readers can bring some of the new skills they’ve acquired to these selections, which range across periods and styles. A chapter on meter illuminates the rhythmic dimension of poetry and guides readers through methods of scansion.
Holbrook also offers guidance on essay writing, preparing students for literary discussion within and beyond the classroom. The conciseness of the book makes it portable and affordable, while its various instructive components make it a resource that will continue to serve its readers as their explorations of poetry continue.
Comments
“Susan Holbrook’s How to Read (and Write About) Poetry is a terrific textbook for helping students become more confident and careful readers of poetry. Offering a terrific selection of primary texts, from Shakespeare to Harryette Mullen, William Blake to Gertrude Stein, this collection also offers a terrific selection of strategies for and examples of the practice of reading poetry. Holbrook’s engaging writing style and judicious groupings of poems offer something for every student and every instructor.” — Deborah Mix, Ball State University
Acknowledgements
How to Use This Book
Introduction: What Makes Poetry Poetry and Why Are We So Afraid of It?
Poem Discussion One: Sonnet 130, by William Shakespeare
- More Sonnets by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 18
Sonnet 20
Sonnet 73
Sonnet 116
Poem Discussion Two: Harlem Dancer, by Claude McKay
- More Poems by Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
- The Castaways, Claude McKay
Tableau, Countee Cullen
The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes
Letter to My Sister, Anne Spencer
Poem Discussion Three: I, Being born a Woman and Distressed, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- More Modern and Contemporary Sonnets
- Poetics Against the Angel of Death, Phyllis Webb
Nothing in That Drawer, Ron Padgett
Sonnet #15, Alice Notley
so’net I, Paul Dutton
Sonnet for Bonnie, Darren Wershler-Henry
Dim Lady, Harryette Mullen
Poem Discussion Four: The Dance, by William Carlos Williams
- More Ekphrastic Poems
- Young Sycamore, William Carlos Williams
Venus Transiens, Amy Lowell
Preciosilla, Gertrude Stein
Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara
from Pictograms from the Interior of B.C., Fred Wah
Poem Discussion Five: Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats
- More Odes, Apostrophes, Addresses
- Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats
A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg
July Man, Margaret Avison
To My Twenties, Kenneth Koch
Late One Night, Margaret Christakos
Poem Discussion Six: The Tyger, by William Blake
- More Poems about Animals
- The Lamb, William Blake
The Flea, John Donne
A narrow Fellow in the Grass, Emily Dickinson
A DOG, Gertrude Stein
The Shark, E. J. Pratt
Bird-Witted, Marianne Moore
Poem Discussion Seven: r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, by E.E. Cummings
- More Concrete Poems
- Easter Wings, George Herbert
l(a, E.E. Cummings
Forsythia, Mary Ellen Solt
Cycle No. 22, bp Nichol
In Medias Res, Michael McFee
Love Song, Margaret Christakos
Poem Discussion Eight: Daddy, by Sylvia Plath
- More Poems “for the ear”
- Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989, Lucille Clifton
Zong! #1, M. NourbeSe Philip
Ravine, Louis Cabri
Poem Discussion Nine: kitchenette building, by Gwendolyn Brooks
- More Poems Displaying the Poetic Force of Syntax
- When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, Walt Whitman
In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound
ASPARAGUS, Gertrude Stein
since feeling is first, E.E. Cummings
Rolling Motion, Erin Mouré
monday, Lisa Robertson
Winter, Mark Truscott
Poem Discussion Ten: The Three Emilys, by Dorothy Livesay
- More Feminist Poems
- Prologue, Anne Bradstreet
In An Artist’s Studio, Christina Rossetti
Sheltered Garden, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater, Dionne Brand
Body Politics, Louise Bernice Halfe
A Brief Guide to Meter
How to Write about Poetry
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Works Cited
Permissions Acknowledgements
Index
Susan Holbrook is a poet, critic, and professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor.
For a sample from How to Read (and Write About) Poetry, click here. (Opens as a PDF.)
