Comments on: too much like cooking?

By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:01:26 +0000

Could you fix the link to the Perkins, Steve? You linked to Paglia twice…
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By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:26:26 +0000

You can find my reaction to the Paglia book here.
As for that Perkins book, what sticks in my mind most about it is the book he wrote later about whether he should have written it; that later book is one I recommend.
“Not so much,” above, refers to the Koch recommendation, not to Don’s comments about audio. (I don’t know what I think of audio in anthologies, except that it must be expensive for publishers.)
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By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:37:22 +0000

Steve,
The one book you haven’t mentioned that pops to mind is Perkins’s A History of Modern Poetry — though it was years ago when I read it, and I remember the style as being pretty academic. But it was a useful critical overview.
I haven’t seen Ross’s book yet, but I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those spousal xmas gifts that are really for oneself. He’s a wonderful writer, but you are too, so I think if you just concentrate on the sentences, the rest will fall into place.
Come to think of it, didn’t Camille Paglia’s book attempt something like this? Not a comprehensive overview, but a layman’s introduction to modern poetry as a pleasure. I wasn’t enamored of it, but I wonder how well it did in general terms.
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By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:24:38 +0000

Not so much: books about how to read poetry, and/or how to write poetry, for beginners are a different animal from books about how to read a given gaggle or a particular historical line of poets.
By the way, are you related to this John Bernard Myers, or just an admirer of that important art-world figure and publisher?
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:21:59 +0000

And also Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poetry with Essays on Reading and Writing, by Koch, again, along with Kate Farrell, though it obviously doesn’t go up to last week.
I’m biased in another direction, which would be to include poetry audio along the lines of Poetry Speaks – recordings accompanied by the texts, essays by good poets, reproductions of manuscript material and photos… but I’d say the poet’s voice should be included. My 80-year old father, who’d never had any prior interest in poetry, recently heard a recording of the late Alan Dugan reading “Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli” and got hooked!
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By: John Bernard Myers

John Bernard Myers — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:31:08 +0000

Aren’t you forgetting Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry by Kenneth Koch?
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