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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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DON'T READ POETRY

Stefanie Burt

A Book About How to Read Poems

In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry.
In this book, Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry, explains how poems speak to one another, and how they can speak to the lives of readers. It shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to poetry of the present.

Unlike other guides, Burt does not approach poetry chronologically, or by school, form, or poet. Instead, her book moves through six reasons to read poetry. These include "feeling and attitude," or how poems can embody, reflect, and share emotions, and "difficulty and frustration," or how poets present us with problems and let us see the world anew. Each chapter explores the theme through the works of various poets and their histories. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that most people make about "poetry," whether they think they like it or think they don't in order to help readers cherish - and distinguish among - individual poems. If the book has one governing argument, it's this: Don't read "poetry"; read poems.

A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University, coeditor of poetry at the Nation, and the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. She lives in Massachusetts.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-05-21 by Basic Books

Book

Published 2019-05-21 by Basic Books

Comments

Don't Read Poetry is for readers hunting sharp, nimble thinking about culture, comprehension, and poems. Whether discussing an ancestral Hawaiian language, a canonical poet like Langston Hughes, or contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano and Jennifer Chang, Stephanie Burt manages to illuminate 'the difficult process of turning paired marks into words.' Don't read poetry, she suggests, read poems. This is a book for anyone who reads with curiosity, care and imagination.

Q & A: Stephanie Burt On Whether Poetry Matters Read more...

KUT-FM Weekend Edition - in this episode of This is Just To Say, producer Rebecca McInroy and Carrie Fountain talk with poet and poetry critic Stephanie Burt about gender and her experience transitioning, and the world of young adult fiction. Read more...

China: United Sky

Author's article: There's a Poem for Every Reader - Instead of trying to define poetry, take pleasure in the many different things poets are able to do with language. ... Read more...

Saying that you like or dislike poetry is akin to saying the same thing about weather or music or people. That's because, as Stephanie Burt says, there's no such single thing as poetry, only poems. And no two poets are doing the same thing.... Read more...

'Don't Read Poetry' is a literary manual for the Instagram era ... Read more...

Burt is well-suited to convince even the most skeptical readers that poems, indeed, should be read by everybody.

When I began Stephanie Burt's Don't Read Poetry, I fully expected her to widen and deepen my appreciation of this art form. Burt is, after all, a masterful poet, teacher, and literary critic. What I didn't necessarily expect was that I'd have such a great time absorbing what she has to say. Whether you love poetry or resist it, you will enjoy this entertaining and enlightening book.

For the past fifty years, poetry critics have battled over what poetry is, which poets mattered, and which didn't. Stephanie Burt says they had it wrong. Don't read poetry, this dedicated pluralist tells us, if by poetry you mean one thing. If however you want to read poems, and discover the manifold ways they can be---and help readers to be---good (for Burt's aesthetic vision is ultimately ethical), read this lucid, informed, and deeply humane book.

[An] inviting guide to an art form often seen as abstruse. At once erudite and colloquial, the book resists prescriptive judgments, teems with surprising juxtapositions, and evokes the contagious enthusiasm of a cool teacher. Read more...

Don't Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems, by Stephanie Burt, professor of English (Basic Books, $30). As the subtitle suggests, Burt attempts, accessibly and successfully, to demystify poetry by focusing readers' attention on individual poems, and the reasons for creating and engaging with them: feelings, character, wisdom, and so on. The author, poetry editor for The Nation, was profiled in "'Kingmaker' to Gatekeeper" (November-December 2017, page 78). Read more...

In this eloquent literary primer, Burt... contends with poetry's reputation for inaccessibility... [A] sweeping, insightful survey. Read more...

terrific Q&A with Stephanie Burt Read more...

...there is no judgment against you if you are in the "not a fan of poetry" camp. But there are some empowering concepts and more than a few compelling arguments should you decide to approach Don't Read Poetry . . . with an open mind, a gracious ear, and a loving heart. Read more...