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Beautiful & Pointless
David Orr
A Guide to Modern Poetry
Harper
April 2011
On Sale: April 5, 2011
252 pages
ISBN: 0061673455
EAN: 9780061673450
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
For most readers, contemporary poetry is a foreign country.
And because they've barely visited poetry, let alone lived
there, readers struggle to enjoy the art for what it is,
rather than what they imagine it to be. In Beautiful & Pointless, award-winning critic David Orr
provides a riveting tour of poetry as it actually exists
today. Orr argues that readers should accept the foreignness
of poetry in the way that they accept the strangeness of any
place to which they haven't traveled—they should expect a
little confusion, at least at first. Yet in the same way
that we can, over time, learn to appreciate the
idiosyncratic delights of, for instance, Belgium, we can
learn to be comfortable with the odd pleasures of poetry by
taking our time and pursuing what we like. Reading poetry, Orr suggests, is more a matter of building a
relationship than proceeding systematically through a
checklist. Beautiful & Pointless provides the foundation for
such a relationship by examining the things poets and poetry
readers talk about when they discuss poetry, such as why
poetry seems especially personal and what it means to write
"in form." Orr, by turns acerbic, incisive, hilarious, and
keen, is what every reader hopes for: that perfect guide who
points the way, doesn't talk too much, and helps you see
what you might have missed. Stimulating, amusing, and
utterly engrossing, Beautiful & Pointless allows us to see
how an individual reader engages poetry, so that we may feel
better equipped to appreciate it in our own way.
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