Robert Pinsky's little 1998 text The Sounds of Poetry whistled its way into my hands from a public library bookshelf when it was new (cf. RulesVersusPrinciples (1999-06-23)). More than a decade later, a used-book-sale copy chirped and came home to stay. It offers thoughtful commentary, well-selected examples, and a professional's perspective on well-chosen words and their artful arrangement.

Last year's Singing School — though twice as thick and larger-format — feels much thinner. There's minimal analysis and a helter-skelter set of mostly out-of-copyright verse, some so lengthy that they feel like padding. A rhetorical question at the end of Pinsky's introduction to Part II ("Listening") unfortunately asks of the interpretations, "Does this analysis make things up, or spin imaginary patterns that don't really exist?" The answer, alas, is "Yes." Many of the hypotheses that Pinsky puts forth seem arbitrary. It's as though he's his own victim of the "Dramatic Fallacy", wherein vivid detail by a good storyteller leads a reader into accepting coincidental or post hoc patterns as real, like the constellations made by random stars. And it's hard to ask, and answer, "Could it have been better otherwise?" about a poem, or anything else for that matter. The mental effort is much easier when examples are visible (cf. Availability heuristic in Wikipedia).

Not to say that Singing School is entirely out of tune. In concluding advice on "Form" (Section III), for instance, Pinsky counsels:

Putting aside the idea of models or formulas, what's the best process, in the pursuit of form? The answer will be different for different writers at different moments. But one suggestion might be to say or at least mutter some words—words you think, or have read, or have heard spoken—and keep listening, patiently and calmly, for something that feels right in their arrangement.

Good idea!

(cf. Pinsky's remarks during a Washington Post online chat in SyntacticSugar (2006-05-02), ...) - ^z - 2014-08-05