How to Read (and Write About) Poetry invites students and others curious about poetry to join the critical conversation about a genre many find a little mystifying, even intimidating. In an accessible, engaging manner, this book introduces the productive questions, reading strategies, literary terms, and secondary research tips that will empower readers to participate in literary analysis. Holbrook explicates a number of poems, initiating readers into critical discourse while highlighting key poetic terms. These useful terms are fully defined in a glossary at the back of the book. The explications are followed by selections of related works, so the book thus offers what amounts to a brief anthology, ideal for a poetry unit or introductory class on poetry and poetics. Readers can bring some of the new skills they’ve acquired to these selections, which range across periods and styles. A chapter on meter illuminates the rhythmic dimension of poetry and guides readers through methods of scansion. The second edition includes a fresh selection of poems, including works by Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Valerie Martinez, and others, and updated MLA citation guidance for 2021.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements How to Use This Book Introduction: What Makes Poetry Poetry and Why Are We So Afraid of It?Poem Discussion One: Sonnet 130, by William Shakespeare More Sonnets by William Shakespeare Sonnet 18 Sonnet 20 Sonnet 73 Sonnet 116 Poem Discussion Two: Harlem Dancer, by Claude McKay More Poems by Writers of the Harlem Renaissance The Castaways, Claude McKay Tableau, Countee Cullen The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes Letter to My Sister, Anne Spencer A Mona Lisa, Angelina Weld Grimké Poem Discussion Three: I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed, by Edna St. Vincent Millay More Modern and Contemporary Sonnets Poetics Against the Angel of Death, Phyllis Webb Nothing in That Drawer, Ron Padgett Sonnet #15, Alice Notley so’net 1, Paul Dutton Sonnet for Bonnie, Darren Wershler-Henry Dim Lady, Harryette Mullen LXXIII, Sonnet L’Abbé Poem Discussion Four: The Dance, by William Carlos Williams More Ekphrastic Poems Young Sycamore, William Carlos Williams Venus Transiens, Amy Lowell Preciosilla, Gertrude Stein Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara The Starry Night, Anne Sexton from Pictograms from the Interior of B.C., Fred Wah Granite Weaving, Valerie Martínez Poem Discussion Five: Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats More Odes, Apostrophes, Addresses To Night, Charlotte Smith A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg July Man, Margaret Avison To My Twenties, Kenneth Koch Late One Night, Margaret Christakos Winnipeg, you’re so pretty, Molly Cross-Blanchard Poem Discussion Six: The Tyger, by William Blake More Poems about Animals The Lamb, William Blake The Flea, John Donne A narrow Fellow in the Grass, Emily Dickinson A DOG, Gertrude Stein The Shark, E.J. Pratt Bird-Witted, Marianne Moore THE ARK, Nasser Hussain Poem Discussion Seven: r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r, by E.E. Cummings More Concrete Poems Easter Wings, George Herbert l(a, E.E. Cummings Forsythia, Mary Ellen Solt Cycle No. 22, bpNichol In Medias Res, Michael McFee Love Song, Margaret Christakos Flattening spirits … , Sachiko Murakami Find Hope, Simina Banu Poem Discussion Eight: Daddy, by Sylvia Plath More Poems “for the ear” Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins The Cat and the Saxophone (2 A.M.), Langston Hughes at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989, Lucille Clifton Blah-Blah, Harryette Mullen Zong! #1, M. NourbeSe Philip Ravine, Louis Cabri Poem Discussion Nine: kitchenette building, by Gwendolyn Brooks More Poems Displaying the Poetic Force of Syntax When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, Walt Whitman In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound ASPARAGUS, Gertrude Stein since feeling is first, E.E. Cummings Rolling Motion, Erin Mouré monday, Lisa Robertson Winter, Mark Truscott AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN, Terrance Hayes Poem Discussion Ten: The Three Emilys, by Dorothy Livesay More Feminist Poems Prologue, Anne Bradstreet In an Artist’s Studio, Christina Rossetti Sheltered Garden, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater, Dionne Brand Body Politics, Louise Bernice Halfe I Wish I Had More Sisters, Brenda Shaughnessy A Brief Guide to Meter How to Write about Poetry Glossary of Poetic Terms