Poems to Read: An Annotated Anthology

I love poetry. I love letting the flow of words wash over me, letting the sounds and the feelings and the moods overtake my consciousness. I also appreciate the power of terseness, the joy of precision, of finding exactly the right words to convey something - an image, a feeling, an object, an event - in only a handful of words.

Although poetry can be intellectual and engage your brain, the best poetry is emotional. Even though some forms of poetry have very strict rules and are very regimented, they're generally only used successfully when the poet somehow manages to transcend the formalness and structure and make us forget that those rules even exist.

Poems to Read, edited by Robert Pinsky, is a book that understands this and tries to explain this through example. Unlike most poetry anthologies that just present the poems, this one often presents a short testimonial before a poem or a note explaining how the mechanics worked to foster the emotional impact or even a quote somehow related to the poem. The notes and other short commentary mainly come from Pinsky but the testimonials generally come from everyday people who participated in the Favorite Poems Project, sent in letters explaining why they identify with or love a particular poem.

Reading excerpts from these letters before the poems in question can be a powerful experience. It can enhance your own enjoyment of the poem, make you think about the poem more deeply than perhaps you would have otherwise done. But it also predisposes you to thinking about the poems in a certain way, to read them with an eye toward determining whether you agree or disagree with the preceding statements.

I'd prefer the opportunity to read the poems first, to come up with my own thoughts and judgements independent of any guidance or suggestion. Then I'd love to see if I agree with others, or to take the thoughts of others and re-evaluate my own thoughts and feelings based on what they say. I have no problems re-reading the poems with thoughts initiated by others in mind, I just want the opportunity to gather my own thoughts independently first.

That complaint out of the way, I really do like this format. Having some other piece of text to relate to the poems does change the way you read them. Some of the quotes, in particular, are wonderfully appropriate for their accompanying poems.

The anthology is rather large, and even with all of the accompanying material still contains over 200 poems. They're organized into thematic sections covering childhood, love, death, sounds and expression, images and objects, and writing. I particularly like that Pinsky groups together poems concentrated on voice and sounds as well as those that extensively explore imagery. It's unusual to group poems by anything but concept covered within. It was different and fun to see a whole slew of poems without anything in common other than that they painted word pictures.

Most of the poems in the book are from name poets, and many are famous poems. Some poets within are famous for things other than poetry and a few aren't terribly well-known. You'll find poets like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Ogden Nash as well as poems by people like D.H. Lawrence and Abraham Lincoln. The poets span many different eras and locales, although the majority are British or American and from either the 19th or 20th centuries. As with any anthology there are poems and poets that are missing, but all in all this is a pretty representative sampling of styles. It's perhaps a bit weak on nonsense poetry, but I probably just think that because I enjoy nonsense poetry so much.

I do wish that the commentary, testimonial, or quote had been placed after the poems rather than before, but otherwise I have few real complaints about this anthology. I like the way the poems are organized, the extra material presented was always interesting and often made me consider a new take on an old favorite or an unfavored poem. If you're in the market for a general poetry anthology you could do a lot worse than Poems to Read.