Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable. Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works, finding intense verbal music, wild imagination in matter-of-fact language, surrealist aplomb, and subtlety in meter.--From publisher description.