How to Play a Poem / Don Bialostosky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bialostosky, Don H., author.

Series:

Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture.

Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry--History and criticism.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 PDF (xvii, 235 pages).)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2017]

Summary:

Approaching poems as utterances designed and packaged for pleasurable reanimation, How to Play a Poem leads readers through a course that uses our common experience of language to bring poems to life. It mobilizes the speech genres we acquire in our everyday exchanges to identify "signs of life" in poetic texts that can guide our co-creation of tone. How to Play a Poem draws on ideas from the Bakhtin School, usually associated with fiction rather than poetry, to construct a user-friendly practice of close reading as an alternative to the New Critical formalism that still shapes much of teaching and alienates many readers. It sets aside stock questions about connotation and symbolism to guide the playing out of dynamic relations among the human parties to poetic utterances, as we would play a dramatic script or musical score. How to Play a Poem addresses critics ready to abandon New Criticism, teachers eager to rethink poetry, readers eager to enjoy it, and students willing to give it a chance, inviting them to discover a lively and enlivening way to animate familiar and unfamiliar poems.

Contents:

Preface

Introduction

1. Reanimation

2. Utterances

3. Signs of life 1 : marks of making, signs of design

4. Assignments, a reading, and some warnings

5. Signs of life 2 : speech genres

6. Naming of parts

7. Signs of life 3 : "figures of thought" or gestures or "interactional devices"

8. Toward tone

9. Playing tone

10. Versification and intonation 1 : lines and stanzas

11. Versification and intonation 2 : meter and stress in iambic pentameter

12. Versification and intonation 3 : meet the other feet

13. Climbing mount "Lycidas"

14. Complications of narration 1 : "Goody Blake and Harry Gill"

15. Complications of narration 2 : "Simon Lee"

16. Complications of narration on more familiar ground

17. "Attack of the difficult poems" : Charles Bernstein's experiments

Appendix : a Bakhtin-school pedagogy for poetry.

Notes:

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-226) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822982357

0822982358

OCLC:

991579380