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Why Poetry

by Matthew Zapruder

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1601171,654 (3.93)1
"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... 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"--… (more)
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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. ( )
  rumbledethumps | Mar 23, 2021 |
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"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... 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"--

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