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    Why Poetry
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    Why Poetry
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    Why Poetry
    Ebook271 pages4 hours

    Why Poetry

    By Matthew Zapruder

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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. 

    Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 15, 2017
    ISBN9780062343093
    Unavailable
    Why Poetry
    Author

    Matthew Zapruder

    Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come on All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Father’s Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. His poetry has been adapted and performed by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider and Attacca Quartet at Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Performances and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by Missy Mazzoli commissioned for the Ecstatic Music Festival at Carnegie Hall. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

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    Reviews for Why Poetry

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    • 3/5
      Zapruder aims to take poetry out of the stultified classrooms where most of us first learned formal poetry. He does an admirable job, arguing that anyone can really understand poetry, that all the academic mystery that surrounds it is mostly nonsense and ends up making people hate poetry. All we need to do is understand the words, look at how the poet has formed the space of those words, and think about it. It is comprehensible to most anyone who speaks the language. He writes, "Good poets do not deliberately complicate something just to make it harder for a reader to understand."

      A poem is meant to bring you out of your regular day to day use of language, to slow you down, and connect you with words, ideas, images, and feelings in ways that most of us rarely do. But, I guess since the book he was writing was in prose, he couldn't resist returning to the mundane, and talking about current politics.