Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry

Kenneth Koch

Simon and Schuster, Apr 8, 1999 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 320 pages

From one of the most esteemed American poets of the twenty-first century comes a celebration of poetry and an invitation for anyone to experience its beauty and wonder.

Full of fresh and exciting insights, Making Your Own Days illuminates the somewhat mysterious subject of poetry for those who read it and for those who write it—as well as for those who would like to read and write it better. By treating poetry not as a special use of language but as a distinct language—unlike the one used in prose and conversation—Koch clarifies the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens to the heart and mind while reading a poem.

Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works from poets past and present. Lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery; each selection is accompanied by an explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text and to put pleasure back into the experience of poetry.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Hebephrene - LibraryThing

This is a wonderful book and about as kind and wise a book as you could find about what it means to write poetry and why. While the book trends towards more classicism in its second half it is , as ...

Making your own days: the pleasures of reading and writing poetry

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Koch, a preeminent American poet and author of two best-selling books on teaching poetry to children, has at last produced a guide for adults. This book is divided into two parts: a series of essays ...

Contents

• A Brief Preface: 13
• The Two Languages: 19
• Music: 27
• The Inclinations of the Poetry Language: 51
• The Poetry Base: 71
• Inspiration: 81
• Writing: 93

About the author

Kenneth Koch is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Straits, and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1994. He has also published fiction and plays, as well as books on the teaching of poetry: Wishes, Lies and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and I Never Told Anybody. He lives in New York City, where he is professor of English at Columbia University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry; A Touchstone book
• Author: Kenneth Koch
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 1999
• ISBN: 0684824388, 9780684824383
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Writing / General; Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism / Books & Reading; Literary Criticism / Comparative Literature; Literary Criticism / Poetry; Poetry / Anthologies (multiple authors)