The Sound of Poetry, by Robert Pinsky

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 128 pages, $16

In the wake of his translation of Dante's Inferno and his appointment as the nation's poet laureate, Robert Pinsky has become American poetry's ambassador, as well as its lord mayor. He has made himself a visible, audible, and effective advocate for poetry as few American poets before him have done, and he may well succeed in rescuing the craft of verse from the shoe-shuffling embarrassment in which it has languished here since about the time of the death of Longfellow. Poets have spoken much to themselves, to each other, and to their faithful readers, but rather little to the busy outer world, except in despair over that world's unthinkable neglect of them. Pinsky apparently has not heard, as Germaine Greer says, that there are now more people writing poetry than reading it; in his optimism, he has set out, among other things, to create an archive of America's favorite poems as selected and read by average citizens. He believes that America is, despite evidence to the contrary, a poetry-loving nation -- and so it may be, before he is done.

The Sound of Poetry, a kind of beginner's guide to the appreciation of verse, is a part of Pinsky's ambassadorial enterprise. It is not, and does not pretend to be, an exhaustive guide to the creation of formal verse, nor is it a history of meter, form, or style in English-language poetry. Rather, it is a painless journey through the foothills of poetry, considered through the topics of accent, line, musical values, and form. Largely free of technical terms (unless thunketta is a technical term -- it's something like a dactyl), it is likely to be quite welcoming to the reader just starting to be curious about how poetry functions and is written. This is the very sort of book to which one might turn after hearing, say, President Clinton reading his favorite poem on the radio.

One of the marvelous things about this book is Pinsky's deep recognition that a poem is successful not because of the poet's ambition or sense of purpose but because of the effect it creates in the reader, and in many readers over time: "I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span . . . to share feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those who come after us." He has blown off the dust of guild secrecy that typifies many poetic manuals: his is an open book.

This is far from the sort of manifesto that characterized poets' prose for much of this century. Pinsky's measured paragraphs do not denounce or discard past or present; his aesthetics unhesitatingly take in not only Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Hardy but also James McMichael, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, James Wright, and Robert Frost. The peaceful reconciliation of these varied voices within one book is perhaps further proof that we are, as Geoffrey O'Brien has suggested, living in an Alexandrian age of collection and appreciation. There is room for both Allen Ginsberg and Fulke Greville on your bookshelf, just as there is room for Jean Baptiste Lully and They Might Be Giants in your CD changer. And, good diplomat that he is, Pinsky recognizes and cherishes the latent poetry of daily sound: "Every speaker, intuitively and accurately, courses gracefully through immensely subtle manipulations of sound . . . it is almost as if we sing to one another all day." This, perhaps, is the poem of America that Pinsky has been seeking, and that he re-creates in his own advocacy and writings.