Rhyme's Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry - Explore Poetic Structure & Literary Design for Writers, Students & Book Lovers - Perfect for Creative Writing, Poetry Analysis & Literature Studies

Most of us, at one time or another, have experienced poetry in an emotional way - even if it simply made us laugh a little harder at the silly joke on the birthday card. Could we experience this emotional connection more often? More deeply?“Give a person a fish,” the saying goes, “and they will eat for a day. Teach them how to fish, and they will eat for a lifetime.” While it’s true that Brad Leithauser’s book, “Rhyme’s Rooms,” offers many of us a gift we will value - a better understanding of what’s going on, musically and visually, in the poetic lines that he examines - his main objective is to teach us how to fish.But if you’ve ever spent time with someone who REALLY knows how to fish, even if their expertise is confined to just trout fishing, deep sea fishing, or ice fishing, you have glimpsed how much there is to learn. Wouldn’t that take an awful lot of time?Yes. That is both the bad news and the good news.“Poetry is a collection of words creating patterns of expectations about the sound and structure of the words themselves.”This is one of several possible definitions of poetry in the book. To most of us, it does not sound like more fun than a barrel of monkeys. But Leithauser has obviously spent thousands of hours working towards a deeper understanding of those “patterns of expectations.” And there is no indication that he wants a single second of that time backLike most good instructors, he teaches both by lesson plan and by personal example. By paying attention to his observations about “the architecture of poetry,” we learn HOW we might enter into a deeper understanding of what he calls the Prosodic Contract - an expectations game between poet and reader. But we also learn a great deal about his personal love of poetry - and thereby, about WHY we might want to invest some time - as we travel with him, skipping from one century to another, from one poetic style to another, trying out our new bag of poetry tricks.Many of the “tricks” were new for me, anyway. Maybe you’ve already spent some time wondering if enjambment might be the poet’s third most important tool, or why nobody writes in unrhymed iambic tetrameter, ever. If so, you will have a different experience of the book than I had.For those of us who might be a little intimidated by this manual for improving our performance as poetry readers, Leithauser does his best to calm us down. The writing style is relaxed, and the analogies and examples are about things like road trips and vampire novels, perhaps deliberately avoiding more erudite possibilities. There is a glossary at the back of the book for terms like “enjambment.” Words like this don’t appear too frequently in the text, but when they do they are in bold face type. If it’s a term you need help with, you can flip to the back of the book. If not, just continue reading.But perhaps the best news about this “manual” is that it teaches us how to enjoy poetry by enabling us to enjoy poetry as we read. A manual about tennis must be put down before we can actually enjoy playing tennis. But this book is, in part at least, the actual experience that we came looking for. By exploring with Leithauser as my guide, I was able to experience the music of poetry in a more satisfying way than I ever had in the past.Of course, no guided tour can provide the full experience that Leithauser is trying to make available to us. No book can gift wrap the thrill of discovery, or the sometimes emotional meeting of minds with a poet, or what is described in this book as the “precious moment” when the poetry reader’s separate journeys through sound and sense combine into a “winged clarity.” If you really want all that, and Leithauser hopes that you do, then go fish.