An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive
argument for poetry's accessibility to all readers, by critically
acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder
In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder argues that the way
we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us
from enjoying it. He takes on what it is that poetry--and poetry
alone--can do. 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 a poem.
Zapruder explores what poems are and how we can read them so that we
can, as Whitman wrote, "possess the origin of all poems" without the aid
of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can
help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.
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 providing a simple reading method for approaching poems
and illuminating 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.
