Atom Feed

Sunday, February 26, 2006

About.com Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry: "The big move in Robert Pinsky’s primer, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide is the teeny-tiniest. By positing the iamb as the atom of poetry, Pinsky ultimately dispenses with dactyls altogether, calling them “thunketta.” Anapests survive: Pinsky sees them as the “first, unstressed part of an iamb divided into two,” “bouncing two quick syllables, often elided, into the place of one,” galloping rhythm. In a way, you could say Pinsky’s gone digital poetry, espousing a terminology that covers the maximum number of cases with the minimum number of terms.

# posted by will : 7:20 AM