Making Your Own Days The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry

InMaking Your Own Days,celebrated poet Kenneth Koch writes about poetry as no one has written about it before -- and as if no onehadwritten about it before. Full of fresh and exciting insights and experiences, this book makes the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry clear for those who read it and for those who write it -- and for those who would like to read and write it better. Treating poetry not as a special use of language but, in fact, as a separate language -- unlike the one used in prose and conversation -- Koch is able to clarify the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens in a reader's mind and feelings while reading a poem.Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works: lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation -- by poets past and present from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery. Each selection is accompanied by an illuminating explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text.In this book, Kenneth Koch's genius for making poetry clear and for bringing out its real pleasures is everywhere apparent.

Kenneth Koch is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Straits, and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1994. He has also published fiction and plays, as well as books on the teaching of poetry: Wishes, Lies and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody. He lives in New York City, where he is professor of English at Columbia University.

Contents

A Brief Preface

Part I The Language of Poetry

1. The Two Languages
2. Music

Repetition and Rhythm

Line Division

Meter

Non-Metrical Poetry

Rhyme

Non-Rhyming and Irregularly Rhyming Poetry

Stanzas and Poetic Forms

3. The Inclinations of the Poetry Language

Comparisons

Personification and Apostrophe

Lies

A Few Other Inclinations

4. The Poetry Base

Part II Writing and Reading Poetry

1. Inspiration
2. Writing
3. Reading

Long Poems

Dramatic Poetry

Poetry in Other Languages and in Translation

Part III An Anthology of Poems

Index
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