Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud

by Robert Pinsky (Editor)

This lively, abundant book is distinguished by its focus on hearing poetry read aloud. Robert Pinsky, beloved for his ability to bring poetry to life as spoken language, has collected poems that sound marvelous in a reader s actual or imagined voice. Pinsky has organized the book into sections with brief introductions that emphasize the attentive, intuitive, and reflective process of listening to poetry. This structure provides an implicit, generous definition-by-example of poetry itself: beginning with Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes and Long Lines and proceeding through fundamental themes such as Love Poems, Odes, Complaints, and Celebrations, and Jokes, Ripostes, Parodies, and Insults. Essential Pleasures gives a fresh setting to traditional favorites, including poems by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, placed among contemporary poems by John Ashbery, Louise Glu ck, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many others. This is an inviting and distinguished collection and an essential book for every home.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Anthologies

508 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2009

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[Diann Blakely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among our Poets Laureate, who has done--and continues to do--more to bring poetry to people, and people to poetry, than Robert Pinsky?  Author of eight collections of verse himself, translator of the INFERNO (a national bestseller), essayist, editor, and critic, not only of poetry but of America itself, Pinsky has just issued a new anthology of poems to read aloud, ESSENTIAL PLEASURES. Accompanied by a CD on which Pinsky reads a brief selection, including Keats and the single heartbreaking poem left behind by Chidiock Tichbourne, this book brings home the message behind much he has written earlier, including THE SOUNDS OF POETRY: what’s on the page is primarily an aural and oral art, fully enjoyed when we’re willing to use our ears as well as our eyes.

Pinsky divides the book through seven modes of poems, preceding each selection with a succinct and helpful essay on what’s to come. Starting “Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes,” he moves to “Ballads, Repetitions, Refrains,” where the reader will find one of the earliest, best known, and most beloved poems in the language, the anonymously written “Western Wind.” There’s a section of love poems, of course, and the book ends with “Parodies, Ripostes, Jokes, and Insults,” including C. D Wright’s “Personals,” which opens “Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth / are small and even . . . Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench / where I could eat my piemento cheese in peace.” ESSENTIAL PLEASURES is a delight to keep at any bedside, on any desk, or in any lunchbox. For an interview with Pinsky about anthology and more, published in the NEW YORKER, here's an "essential" link: http://downloads.newyorker.com/mp3/bl...

With Pinsky’s help, his publisher, Norton, celebrated National Poetry Month in 2009 on a website called "Poems Out Loud" (http://poemsoutloud.net/poets/poet/ro... yes, the link is still active.  Pinsky blogged on the site each day, and an mp3 accompanied each post; additionally, the site contains many essays and mp3’s by Norton poets.  (Also check out Knopf’s, www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ www.poets.org to sign up for their continuing “Poem-A-Day features.”). Furthermore, April 2009 saw the publication of THOUSANDS OF BROADWAYS (University of Chicago Press), a collection of Pinsky's essays about the often-troubled heart and soul of America from which the inspiration for so many of his own poems has come.

(originally published in BOOKPAGE, April 2009)

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super read! Lots of great poems! I found some old ones and discovered new ones. Some of my favorite include:

When You're Lying Awake with a Dismal Headache by W.S. Gilbert
Columbus by Ogden Nash
The House that Jack Built by Anonymous
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
When I Was Fair & Young by Queen Elizabeth I
Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Home Burial by Robert Frost
Tributaries by Louise Gluck
Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden
Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Lost Pilot by James Tate
Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
The Tyger aka Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright by William Blake
To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane
Ode to a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Chemo Side Effects: Memory by Elise Partridge

There's also a CD included, but I didn't listen to it. I prefer to read my poetry aloud and not listen to it.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something about the taste of words in your mouth, which, when read aloud, fulfill a basic need. Well, maybe not a 'basic need' but rather fulfill the spaces rolling around your tongue, teeth, and lips and overflow into your mind as they swell and soar in meaning and your eyes start dancing with delight at the line-up of consonance and vowels which trip over each other and the audial sensors expand and contract to absorb the sounds of language and meaning that trickle through. A read that makes you grateful for language, memories, hope, joy, and living.

I want to own this book.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great selection of poems from the last four hundred years or more, organized into basic groups like "love poems" or "stories" or "jokes and parodies." Interesting mix of styles, periods, and tones of voice. I already knew about a dozen of these pretty well, and they are among my all-time favorites. A CD is included with Robert Pinsky reading his own favorites, but I haven't listened to that yet.

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I breezed through this book rapidy because it was overdue and I was getting behind in my reading,(I certainly did not read it out loud) but absorbed enough of it to want to read it some more. There's a wide variety of excellent poetry in here and also a CD with readings by the author. I recognized some children's poems as well as poetry by poets like Marvell, Williams, and Eliot.

[Anthony Manna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a poetry anthology that you will return to over and over again---as I have seeking the varied voices of classical poets like Dickinson, Shakespeare, Hardy, and the like, and contemporary ones like Hughes, Ashbery, Simic, and Heaney. Unique: the poems are organized by elements that emphasize speaking and listening to poetry.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine collection with a bonus CD

Most poems should in fact be read aloud. Part of the power of poetry is in the spoken word, the sound that reverberates around the head and through the heart and mind. Poetry is in fact a non-linear expression that engages more than the denotative sense of words. It is a way of achieving through various poetic devices: allusion, alliteration, consonance, rhythm, rhyme, sound and even typography, a depth of meaning and experience not possible from mere prose.

Still it is true that some poems sound better read aloud than others, and Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate 1997-2000, has come up with a collection of some of the best ever written, designed to please both ear and mind.

The organization is in seven parts. Part I features "Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes," e.g., Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"; Robert Frost, "Dust of Snow"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall"; Edgar Allan Poe, "Fairy-Land"; five by Emily Dickinson, and twenty-six more. Notice that for the most part the selected poems are not necessary the poet's best or best known. And perhaps the greatest accomplishment in English that might fall under the heading of "Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes," namely Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" doesn't appear perhaps because of its length. I would have liked to have seen included e e cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town."

Part II "Long Lines, Strophes, Parallelisms" features the first three chapters of Ecclesiastes; "When You're Lying Awake" from W.S. Gilbert; Allen Ginsberg's inspired musings on Walt Whitman, "A Supermarket in California"; a couple from Walt Whitman and fourteen others. In his introduction to this part, Pinsky presents some thoughts of how stanzas might break down, how lines might be divided and how the energy and sense of a poem might thereby be affected.

Part III is "Ballads, Repetitions, Refrains," an eclectic presentation including Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky'; Julia Ward Howe's "Battle-Hymn of the Republic"; Pinsky's own "Samurai Song"; Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy," etc., and this famous anonymous gem:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

Part IV: "Love Poems" includes Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" with its beautiful turn to open the last stanza: "Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!..."; Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes"; Andrew Marvell's famous "To His Coy Mistress"; something from Sappho, three sonnets from Shakespeare, and many more.

Part V gives us "Stories" of which my favorite is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot which Pinsky rightly sees as more of a story poem than a love poem; Robert Browning's chilling "My Last Duchess"; Shelley's cautionary tale, "Ozymandias"; Wilfred Owen's take on that old lie, "Dulce Et Decorum Est"; Ernest Lawrence Thayer's popular "Casey at the Bat"; and thirty-five more.

Part VI is entitled "Odes, Complaints, and Celebrations" and it features William Blake's "The Tyger"; which is a celebration of sorts; Coleridge's beautiful opium dream "Kubla Khan"; "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn" from Keats; and many others.

In Part VII Pinsky gives us "Parodies, ripostes, Jokes and Insults" including Eliot insulting himself in "How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot" while parodying Edward Lear's "How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear" (also included); and some thirty-five more. Here's Theodore Roethke's joke on the square entitled "Academic":

The stethoscope tells what everyone fears:
You're likely to go on living for years,
With a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper,
And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.

Pinksy provides an introduction to each part. There's a CD included with the book in which Pinsky reads twenty-one of the poems including "Ode to a Nightingale," and Milton's "Methought I saw my late espoused saint." I must observe that while Pinsky reads very well and it was a pleasure to hear him, he might want to redo his reading of Emily Dickinson's "The Soul selects her own Society" since he has the wrong meaning of "present" as evidenced by his pronunciation "prez'ent" instead of "pri-zent'" with the accent on the second syllable. The sense in the poem


The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--
Present no more--

Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--

I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Values of her attention--
Like Stone--


is that it is no use to present to her anymore since she is "unmoved" and has closed the Values of her attention--/Like stone--." (NOT that her divine Majority is no longer present.) The sense is that of the Soul as a kind of exalted royalty that one might present before.

This quibbling aside, Pinsky has put together a most interesting and entertaining poetry experience, one that I highly recommend.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo: Selected Poems”

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of the classic poems and short stories you'll ever want to read are in this book. A great book to keep by your bedside!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous anthology--I loved it! This book contains a satisfying mix of poems old and new, with so many different styles, it's hard to imagine anyone truly disliking it. It would make a great gift.

[Karin Salisbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection! Enjoying each selection. <3

[Hannah Contreras · Rating 5 out of 5]

And done! I’m proud to say that I DID read each and every poem in here out loud. And what a joy it was to experience. It completely changed, and most definitely enhanced, my experience of poetry. We often forget that poetry grew out of spoken performance. It helps so much to HEAR the words and feel them on your tongue as you make your way through a poem. It adds color and flavor to what otherwise might not have made an impression on you. Especially in the longer narrative poems or the comedic ones, I could feel myself getting into character as I read through it. This book helped me discover so many new poets, and the selection was varied and diverse, from all different kinds of poets from all different time periods. It introduced to me in full some poems by famous poets that I had only heard of or read snippets of, and it was even better to read them aloud. What a great project, and how rewarding it feels to say I did it — I did read all of them out loud!

[Pushpak Karnick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a treat. It is not an easy read by any means, but with patience, one can learn to peek under the hood of poems and see the complex and intricate thoughts woven together in a structure that is not apparent to the uninitiated (like myself). I cannot claim to have "finished" this book because I think this book is the beginning to understanding poetry.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of poem. Some are classics others are less well known. What's I liked is that it was organized by topic and not chronology. There sixteenth century poets next to living poets. This also comes with a CD of twenty of the poems read by Pinksy. One of the best anthologies I've found.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every lover of poetry should own this!

[Tim Nason · Rating 2 out of 5]

2⭐️ Should be called “Gratuitous Miseries.”

[Dorinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good intro to some new poems and opportunities to revisit familiar works. Not read in a space with access to play the enclosed recording but hope to borrow from library again to listen to theat.

[Cassidy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll be honest, I only opened this because I need a poem for a school project (and therefore only skimmed the poems - maybe I'll go back later to reread them), but I don't like how the editors of this book do all the analyzing for you. It makes me feel like their interpretation is the correct one.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished! I've been reading this collection of poems FOR-EV-ER! I had one library copy for at least six months and then someone requested it, so I had to send it back. But I was so close to the end, I reserved it again and was able to finish it. To figure out which poem I want to memorize each month, I need to read a lot of poems. This was a good anthology, ranging over many centuries with a suitable mix of men and women. It also includes a CD of Pinsky reading some of the poems, which I've not listened to. It does not include a blurb about each poet, which I would have liked, but otherwise, a good book that has yielded seven poems I have memorized and a nice list of potential ones.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I always want to understand poetry better. I was hoping this book would help me but I don't think I am patient enough (or smart of enough.) The two stars is more a reflection of me and not of the author and the material. Maybe someday I'll learn more and enjoy poetry more.

[Alessandra Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love collections of poems and this one is great! and I learned some old-to-the-world-new-to-me poets, i want to check out more thoroughly. A lot of classic poems are in this collection such as some of Keat's To Autumn and Marlowe's To His Coy Mistress.

[Moira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still go to this book and find something new and different

[Crystal]

Just reaffirmed what I already knew: I don't really like poetry! There are a few poems I have come accross and enjoyed. One such poem was in this collection. I want to love poetry, I just dont. =(

[Mills College Library]

808.81 E786 2009

[Susan]

Terrific, need to get back to this when I can. Add it to your lists.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of these poems truly are a pleasure to read aloud.

[Suzanne Hess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Highly recommended. The selected poems are delightful. Read them aloud for the full effect.

[Louise Parr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this anthology.