{"product_id":"rhymes-rooms-isbn-9780525655053","title":"Rhyme's Rooms","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the foundation up, will find this room-by-room guide on the architecture of poetry a warm companion.” —Tomás Q. Morín, author of \u003ci\u003eMachete\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, \"not for its \u003ci\u003ewhat\u003c\/i\u003e but its \u003ci\u003ehow\u003c\/i\u003e.\" In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to \"rhyme and the way we really talk,\" Leithauser takes a deep dive into that \u003ci\u003ehow\u003c\/i\u003e—the very architecture of poetry. He explains how meter and rhyme work in fruitful opposition (\"Meter is prospective; rhyme is retrospective\"); how the weirdnesses of spelling in English are a boon to the poet; why an off rhyme will often succeed where a perfect rhyme would not; why Shakespeare and Frost can sound so similar, despite the centuries separating them. And Leithauser is just as likely to invoke Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, or Boz Scaggs as he is Chaucer or Milton, Bishop or Swenson, providing enlightening play-by-plays of their memorable lines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePortions of this book have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker, The New York Times,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books.\u003c\/i\u003e“Seldom has a guidebook to prosody ever been so sprightly, so much fun to read, with deeply knowledgeable insights gingered throughout with low-keyed humor . . . Leithauser’s witty \u003ci\u003eRhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e blueprints the struts and girders, the iron armature, needed to create even the airiest lyric. [It] is a book of revelations.”\u003cb\u003e—Michael Dirda,\u003ci\u003e The Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Readers ready to discover the power of poetry need look no further . . . Leithauser brilliantly elucidates poetry for ‘the reader who loves words and literature, but maybe feels some trepidation . . . on confronting a poem on a page’ . . . [He] facilitates a deep appreciation of the craft without slipping into academic jargon, and his own prose is lyrical . . . His writing is a joy to read, as is his message that poetry can benefit one’s mind—the first message of all poems, he writes, is to ‘slow down.’” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A warm, well-considered celebration of a rich literary form. . . [Leithauser] aims his thoughtful overview of prosody at general readers who may feel trepidation when encountering a poem . . . Unlike scholarly books that focus mostly on what a poem says, Leithauser is equally concerned with how a poem conveys meaning: the building blocks that make for its particular architecture.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brad Leithauser brings élan and a lifetime of learning to his exploration of poetic form. Alert to the ways poetry is at once a traditional and a revolutionary art, \u003ci\u003eRhyme’s Rooms\u003c\/i\u003e invites us to slow down and to observe the powerful interplay among a poem’s technical, musical, emotional, and intellectual elements. The book’s probing chapters on meter, stanza, and rhyme, its succinct and helpful glossary, as well as the scores of poems Leithauser analyzes with sophistication and verve, will open up new interrogations of poetry’s expressive force and will become indispensable to readers, writers, students and teachers.” \u003cb\u003e—Richie Hofmann, author of \u003ci\u003eA Hundred Lovers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Erudite and funny, \u003ci\u003eRhyme’s Rooms\u003c\/i\u003e by Brad Leithauser is a stroll through the art of building poems. It wisely reminds us that the shape of a poem depends as much on the body of the poet as it does on the spirit.” \u003cb\u003e—Tomás Q. Morín, author of \u003ci\u003eMachete\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If Hogwarts Academy recommended this book of practical magic for its Defense Against the Dark Arts curriculum, that wouldn’t be the only excellent reason to buy it. Professor Leithauser knows as much about poetry as anyone alive, and he’s very good company—synoptic, insightful, funny. And the illustrative dollops and samples he brings to table (many of them new to me) might be another reason enough to get this book. It’s a dessert-cart to delight the literary and remind apostates whyever they thought they loved poetry in the first place.” \u003cb\u003e—Richard Kenney, author of \u003ci\u003eTerminator\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is neither a writer’s manual, nor a reader’s handbook, but something much more enticing, an architectural tour of the art of poetry by a contemporary master. Leithauser’s witty and learned presence enlivens every page, but his aim is to help us experience for ourselves how the formal blueprints make for a thrilling environment, how the features of each room play between expectation and surprise. Leithauser’s outlandish hypotheticals acknowledge the strangeness of poetry while his everyday comparisons link it to human fundamentals. He helps us, most importantly, to \u003ci\u003eslow down, \u003c\/i\u003elisten and look, discover the patterns and tensions that make poems such rewarding spaces to wander in.” \u003cb\u003e—Bonnie Costello, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Plural of Us\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An absolutely extraordinary piece of scholarship\/criticism and poetic listening. I was again and again amazed at the range, the inventiveness, and the high poetic level of the prose.” \u003cb\u003e—William Pritchard, Critic and Professor Emeritus at Amherst College\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Brad Leithauser’s every written sentence is infused with music. Part of my own page-by-page delight, roaming through \u003ci\u003eRhyme's Rooms,\u003c\/i\u003e was imagining how much my father would have relished Leithauser’s ardent plunge into the workings of poetry. Leonard Bernstein, who loved words as passionately as he did notes, would have instantly recognized a kindred spirit: another joyful laborer in the pastures of sonority and rhythmic muscle; a fellow reveler in the beauty of rigor, and the rigor of beauty.” \u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jamie Bernstein, author of \u003ci\u003eFamous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In \u003ci\u003eRhyme's Rooms\u003c\/i\u003e Brad Leithauser has written a wise, luminous guide to poetry from Geoffrey Chaucer through Marvin Gaye. A distinguished poet in his own right, Leithauser combines a scholar's wisdom with the wonder of somebody discovering magic.\" \u003cb\u003e—Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic\u003c\/b\u003eBRAD LEITHAUSER is the author, most recently, of \u003ci\u003eThe Promise of Elsewhere,\u003c\/i\u003e and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is his eighteenth book. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore and Amherst, Massachusetts.\u003cp\u003eCHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMeeting the Funesians\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet  us  begin  with  a  tribe  of  people  residing  high  in  the Andes Mountains, where the brisk air is thin and vistas are arrestingly clear. We’ll call them the Funesians. They are a small and in many ways unexceptional community, subsist-ing mostly on boiled potatoes and pickled turnips and a mild rhubarb  brandy.  Days  roll  by,  decades  pass,  marked  chiefly by a gratified uneventfulness. The Funesians are remarkable in  only  one  aspect,  really:  They  are,  far  and  away,  the  fin-est readers of poetry in the world. They hear things the rest of  us  don’t  hear.  The  question  this  book  poses  is  what  can you—whether  you  live  in  New  York  or  London,  in  Johan-nesburg or Jakarta, in a tidal shack or a yurt or a submarine or a castle—learn from the Funesians?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePlenty, I think. In their modest but dizzying excellence, the  Funesians  instruct  and  enlighten  us  about  our  limita-tions as readers and thinkers. Perhaps all art is an expression of human restlessness against our bodily confines and of our adaptations within them; perhaps every art form is an arena for  measuring  the  mettle  of  our  physiological  and  mental capabilities.  Even  so,  poetry—like  its  sister  arts  music  and architecture—is a medium that constantly brings this testing into sharp relief, with pointed and poignant models.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet’s  open  with  a  valedictory  poem  by  Dylan  Thomas, “Prologue,”  completed  in  1952,  shortly  before  his  death. Thomas  himself  did  not  suspect  it,  but  at  his  close  he  was writing for the Funesians. “Prologue” initially appears to lack a  rhyme  scheme.  You  have  to  reach  the  poem’s  exact  mid-point, lines 51 and 52, to meet your first rhyme, a couplet:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSheep white hollow farms\u003cbr\u003eTo Wales in my arms\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom here on out, the rhymes unfold punctually, systemati-cally. The next line, line 53, turns out to rhyme with line 50, and line 54 with 49, and so forth, each later line finding its earlier,  coordinated  partner,  until  finally  the  second-to-last line  rhymes  with  the  poem’s  second  line,  and  its  final  line with its first. Everything’s neatly paired.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Prologue”  is  a  wildly  eccentric  construction.  Thomas built it mostly for himself, I suppose; poets are forever erect-ing self-imposed obstacles that the general reader is unlikely to appreciate, or perhaps even notice. For an ordinary reader, “Prologue” offers a peculiar experience. If it comes across as an  unrhymed  poem  for  most  of  its  length,  there’s  a  fleeting middle  interlude,  beginning  with  line  52,  when  something else occurs: You hear the rhymes chiming away, creating an ever-dwindling music. Depending on your ear, you may hear the rhymes for four or six lines, eight, ten, maybe twelve, but no one is going to hear all fifty-one of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo  one  except  a  Funesian.  To  hold  inside  their  brains, in order, fifty-one rhymes—why, it’s a piece of cake for the Funesians.  Let’s  assume  that,  as  a  little  joke,  Thomas  had created  a  random  and  minuscule  disorder:  The  rhyme  that was supposed to fall at line 89 (linked to line 14) actually fell at  line  88.  You  and  I  would  never  notice.  But  the  Funesian reader’s eyebrows would lift, followed by a slight but unmis-takably  quizzical  shaking  of  the  head. \u003ci\u003eWhat  is  he  doing?\u003c\/i\u003e our Funesian wonders. \u003ci\u003eThe rhymes are out of whack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen  a  poem  is  placed  before  a  Funesian,  he  or  she, though human in all other tastes and talents, becomes a kind of  extraterrestrial.  The  Funesians  notice everything.  Every variant of rhyme, every sonic repetition (not merely of word but  of  syllable  and  phoneme),  every  tiny  buried  euphony and dissonance, every metrical variation, every little tension and  release  in  the  rhythms,  every  pun,  every  punctuational inconsistency—there is no end to all the things they notice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the rest of us (mere human readers), rhymes fade and are meant to fade. Evanescence is the essence of rhyme. Our ears move on. Rhymes live, in Shakespeare’s phrase, within a “dying fall.” For a few instants, a rhyme chimes inside the ear,  recalling  an  earlier  sound.  An  echo  is  celebrated,  then discarded as another echo surfaces.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn poems written for ordinary human beings, the rhymes are  therefore  proximate,  especially  with  the  most  popular forms,  like  the  ballad  or  Shakespearean  sonnet  or  limerick. But as any handbook of poetic forms will show, this propin-quity of rhymes is true of rarefied forms as well (the villanelle, the ballade, terza rima, ottava rima, rhyme royal). Most rhyme schemes require partnered sounds to fall no more than thirty syllables apart—and usually much closer. Sounds come and go within a poem, as each line, with its unique freight of reso-nances, in effect replaces and supplants a previous line, with its  own  unique  freight.  A  poem  is  a  compact  sonic  parade, marching clamorously through the tunnel of the ear canal, an ever-shifting  zone  of  commotion  in  which  the  most  recent sounds serially dominate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt  turns  out  that  thirty  syllables  (three  lines  of \u003cb\u003eiambic pentameter\u003c\/b\u003e—see  the  glossary  for  words  in  boldface  type) represent a chasm both sizable yet bridgeable. A rhyme spaced at  an  interval  of  thirty  syllables  speaks  of  resuscitation,  of  a spirited  and  robust  call-and-response  across  that  black  and echoless abyss that threatens every poem. Having composed poetry  for  more  than  a  millennium,  experimenting  all  the while  with  echoes  and  durations,  English-language  poets have learned that readers can be trusted to hear rhymes across this distance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmong  popular  poetic  structures,  the  Miltonic  son-net  maintains  the  longest  interval  between  rhymes.  It’s  an inflexible form in its octave, or first eight lines (they rhyme \u003cb\u003eABBAABBA\u003c\/b\u003e), though highly flexible in its sestet, or final six lines, which allow rhymes to fall where they may, provided no lines remain unrhymed. These rhymes can therefore achieve a gap as long as fifty syllables, the distance between the end words to lines 9 and 14.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeyond fifty syllables, the distance evidently becomes too great. The web strand linking any two words grows increas-ingly attenuated, then breaks. Of course, poets live to chal-lenge accepted limitations, and they will often (in their spidery ingenuity) contrive to stretch a rhyme as far as it will go. This  is  what’s  happening  at  the  conclusion  of  Robert Frost’s  “After  Apple-Picking.”  (Speaking  of  spiders,  Frost created one of the most memorable web weavers in world lit-erature with his sonnet “Design,” to which we’ll turn in the next chapter.) “After Apple-Picking” is a poem of forty-two rhymed lines that follow no established scheme. At the start, the rhymes are unavoidably clangorous:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree\u003cbr\u003eToward heaven still,\u003cbr\u003eAnd there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill\u003cbr\u003eBeside it, and there may be two or three\u003cbr\u003eApples I didn’t pick upon some bough.\u003cbr\u003eBut I am done with apple-picking now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut  the  rhymes  grow  quieter  at  the  close,  as  the  exhausted speaker\/farmer,  his  harvesting  duties  accomplished,  begins to drift off. And it’s surely no accident that the longest wait for  a  rhyme  consummates  with  the  poem’s  last  word,  a  full seven lines removed from its mate. The poet, like the farmer he’s depicting, can now say, All done at last, as the concluding rhyme drops with an almost subliminal echo into the drows-ing mind:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor all\u003cbr\u003eThat struck the earth,\u003cbr\u003eNo matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,\u003cbr\u003eWent surely to the cider-apple heap\u003cbr\u003eAs of no worth.\u003cbr\u003eOne can see what will trouble\u003cbr\u003eThis sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.\u003cbr\u003eWere he not gone,\u003cbr\u003eThe woodchuck could say whether it’s like his\u003cbr\u003eLong sleep, as I describe its coming on,\u003cbr\u003eOr just some human sleep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrost  has  kept  the  final  rhyme  alive  partly  through  internal rhyme,  thrice  slipping sleep into  these  eleven  lines  before  it materializes as the final rhyme word. Even so, the last rhyme is, appropriately, the softest and sleepiest in the poem. And— perhaps no coincidence—it arrives fifty syllables after its part-ner (fifty-one, actually); in roundabout fashion we’ve arrived at a familiar threshold.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFifty syllables. It’s a sizable distance—the extent of three haikus,  and  longer  than  some  immortal  whole  English- language poems (Frost’s “Hannibal,” A. E. Housman’s “Here Dead  Lie  We,”  Robert  Herrick’s  “The  Coming  of  Good Luck”).  Much  can  be  uttered  in  fifty  syllables—asserted, questioned,  contradicted,  resolved.  But  while  the  reader  is following  these  assertions,  questions,  contradictions,  resolu-tions, she is also holding aloft a sound in her head, waiting for it to encounter its soul mate, and waiting for the two united sounds, now bound in wedlock, to be put to bed. Any good reader of poetry is a born multitasker.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44863570673893,"sku":"NP9780525655053","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525655053.jpg?v=1767735734","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/rhymes-rooms-isbn-9780525655053","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}