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    Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
    Unavailable
    Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
    Unavailable
    Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
    Ebook186 pages3 hours

    Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry

    By David Orr

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta

    Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 12, 2011
    ISBN9780062079411
    Unavailable
    Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
    Author

    David Orr

    David Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, Emeritus, at Oberlin College and the co-editor (with William Becker, Andrew Gumbel, and Bakari Kitwana) of Democracy Unchained (The New Press).

    Read more from David Orr

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    Reviews for Beautiful & Pointless

    3/5

    28 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I picked up this book from the library on a whim, thinking maybe the author might shed a little light on poetry for me. Because on the third page of his introduction he said a "smart, educated person who likes Charlie Kaufman movies and tolerates Thomas Pynchon's novels, who works in a job that involves phrases like 'amortized debentures' or 'easement by estoppel' or 'nomological necessity' - that person is often not so much annoyed by poetry as confounded by it." I don't use those phrases, but I'm sure that some of the ones I do use qualify. I think Charlie Kaufman is a very strange man and rarely like any of his screenplays, nor have I ever read any Pynchon, but I do find poetry annoying and am certainly confounded by it - "modern" poetry in particular. That said, reading this book was a waste of a couple of afternoons. It's clear as with modern art, that I don't "get" modern poetry. My smartass takeaways from this book are that inserting linefeeds, random punctuation and capital Letters in strange spots make good poetry - but it still looks like (sometimes) cleverly formatted prose to me. I looked hard at, and re-read several times, the few poems the author (a poetry critic) said were good. Nope. Didn't see it. They look the same, or worse, than the ones he said were not good. But I keep trying.
    • 3/5
      Orr's guide is not really a guide to reading poems as such, although the chapter on Form does a bit of that. Rather, it is mostly a guide to the established Poetry Business and to how most writers who aspire to formal recognition play the game, willingly or not. If you love or like some poems, that us, if some speak to you in ways that matter, you may be interested in the oil and grease and gears and noise behind the machines that make published poetry. Or not.

      If you are wondering, in the words of the last chapter, "Why bother?" then I would not start here. There are several other books that offer you a way into reading poetry so that you might discover the ones that matter to you and are good art:

      A Poetry Handbook Paperback
      by Mary Oliver

      How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
      Edward Hirsch

      And others.

      Orr offers this humble, and somewhat underwhelming reason:

      "I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all the other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident."

      This is good for those of us who write poetry to read. It steadies us in our hope and ambition to the small crystals we may once in a while produce. It helps us to keep our egos under control.

      But as a reader of poetry, I have heard some poems sing loudly to me in a clear voice that really mattered. Just as certain music has reached me. Certain visual art. Certain movies and plays. There is a reason why we humans keep doing this stuff.

      Orr diminishes Rita Dove when she writes that “[p]oetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” He says that can happen in writing that is not called a poem. Yes. Poetry in Dove's sense is the right words that sing out, loudly or quietly. And this can occur in any place where a writer writes. Poems and the are artifacts. Orr does not clearly make or care to make this distinction.

      For me, as a sometimes published poet, one way outside the academic and conference and MFA and workshop world of the Poe-biz, this book helps me remember to keep two ambitions separate: 1. The ambition to write an artifact that centers around the distilled and powerful saying of meaningful questions and experiences. 2. The ambition of being published enough and recognized enough so that more readers may give what I write a chance.

      The rest is beautiful and pointless noise in the system.
    • 2/5
      David Orr’s book is subtitled, A Guide to Modern Poetry. “Poetry,” Orr tells us, is like a foreign country with strange customs, like Belgium. You wouldn’t think of going to Belgium without first investing in a bit of research, finding out what language they speak there, what currency they use, whether they have any cities worth visiting, or museums, or culinary specialities to look forward to trying. In short, you’d probably want a guidebook, something that will give you a flavour of what you can expect to experience but won’t require you to learn the names and telephones number of everyone in the country in order to gain admittance. It’s possible that Orr believes that Beautiful and Pointless is just such a book. There are certainly some interesting things to learn in it, and it is written in a light and jocular style (I mean, Belgium, right?), and gosh, those Belgians sure have funny practices, the way they cuss and fight and generally think they are far more important than in fact they are. The problem is that I’m not sure anyone would want to visit Belgium, or rather the land of modern poetry, on the basis of this so-called guide. But if Orr were to drop the subtitle, then this book is pretty much what it says on the tin: beautiful and pointless.There are some pleasures available in reading this book. I enjoyed the chapter, “The Fishbowl”, on the practice of poetry, from Creative Writing programs, to poetry competitions, to criticism and reviews, and the incessant need to publish early and often. Some chapters, admittedly, are less entertaining and less coherent, e.g. “Ambition”, “The Personal”, and “The Political”. And the final chapter, “Why Bother?” unwittingly reissues Jeremy Bentham’s derisory “push pin versus poetry” complaint shortly after Orr has disavowed turning to the philosophers to assist in answering the question the chapter title asks. He would have done better to leave it to the professionals. Still, it’s not a bad read, I suppose, in a blokey sort of way.Of course, if you’ve been struggling with a collection of modern poetry and have turned to Beautiful and Pointless as an aid, you may, like me, feel somewhat disappointed. So, not recommended for what perhaps it would like to be recommended for. But certainly no worse than push pin.
    • 3/5
      This is a difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, I appreciate the book for being well-written and jocular, and, let's be honest, just for being about contemporary poetry. I thought the first half was interesting and entertaining. By the end, however, I was less enthused, because Orr seemed to diminish the subject with too many inside-baseball references and with a perplexing argument that reading poetry really is pretty pointless in the end.I'm not quite sure what Orr was trying to accomplish by trivializing the subject of his own book. What's the point of writing it then? Or more importantly to me, of reading it? And I'm not sure to whom I could recommend the book. I don't think it's for readers who are well-read in contemporary poetry. It definitely isn't for beginners looking for pointers or a syllabus. It's a curious work in the end. He comes across as so negative that it makes me wonder why he's really involved in this field at all.
    • 4/5
      I love to read, but I don’t know how to read well. I read widely, but I don’t read deeply.So what is a fifty-four-year-old big reader with a busy life to do to correct this? Read something that teaches one how to read deeply, of course. Of course.I nervously checked this book out of the public library. I love poetry more than any other writing, but I know less about poetry than any other type of writing. Would I find anything of value in this book?Yes, happily, I found that David Orr was the perfect person to turn to in order to write a useful and clever book about poetry. Beautiful and Pointless is a wonderful book for anyone who loves poetry. The text of this book is poetry, with lots of apt metaphors and similes. It’s humorous, too, which I found a great relief. Read this book. Read this book if you like poetry. Read this book if you don’t. It’s that good.
    • 3/5
      This is not at all the book I expected, given its title and jacket blurb.It professes to be "A Guide to Modern Poetry," and there is much talk about Orr's analogy that one should approach poetry as one would a foreign city, but there's precious little actual poetry discussed within this volume. Instead, each section feels more like I've stepped into the middle of someone else's conversation -- for example, in the first chapter, Orr talks about why poetry can be but isn't solely a personal confessional, but since I never thought that was poetry's only goal the whole chapter seemed somewhat wasted. Similarly with the second chapter, which argues that poets can be and often are political -- I knew that already, and it stands to reason that most non-poetry readers would know that as well because many (if not most) of the poems in a high school curriculum are political in nature. And I had the same problem in the chapters on poetic ambition and the poetic "fishbowl" -- I'm sure these are very important concerns to modern poets, but they are of very little interest to this dilettante of a poetry reader.There is a tremendously clear and useful chapter on form, but as it spends very little time addressing the different ways contemporary poets treat form when compared to classical poets, it feels incomplete for what is supposed to be a book specifically aimed at making modern poetry accessible.The whole book feels, really, more like a guide to the world that modern poetry gets written in -- a world of cliques and battles between competing desires to be academic and artistic and very much caught in the shadow of the larger role poetry used to play in culture. Orr is quite funny at times when talking about that world, and tosses off absolutely fascinating comments about how the world got to be that way without elaborating (I really wish he had elaborated on some of them!), but I had no real interest because it always seemed to be a frighteningly insular and myopic place, and this book simply reaffirmed my previous evaluation.