I'm very interested in the aspects of a line of poetry (meter, foot, etc.) and the way that Mary Oliver can break down a line into its basic components without utterly confusing me is incredibly refreshing. I'm glad we covered Write to Learn first, so that way when I opened A Poetry Handbook, I could fully appreciate the friendly tone and the comprehensible diction. I'll also be completely honest by saying that in the email with all our assignments, my eyes completely grazed over the bit about this blog post...but seeing as how at the time I am writing this, there are only twelve other posts, I'm not the only poor soul this happened to.
Anywho, I like that Oliver talked about more types of meter than just iambic pentameter. Don't get me wrong, I love me some good iambic pentameter, but other poetry guides just ramble on and on about it and I'm left sitting there thinking, "Hey, friend, I actually want to learn something from this." She explains more than just the five foot line and the stressed-unstressed pattern, and I found it thoroughly educational. Mary Oliver also goes over how to identify stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem where the lines break and are indented at different intervals. In my past reading, I encountered a poem that looked like this:
Words words
_Words words words,
____words words words,
__words.
And I was left thinking, "What the (expletive deleted) am I supposed to make of this?" Oliver explains it and it makes sense to me--the reader just keeps the pattern going over the weird line breaks. I'm interested to read more to find what other things she covers that I've had past trouble with.
So far, I approve of this book very much.
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