## Metadata - Author: [[Gregory Orr]] - Full Title: A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry - Category: #books ## Highlights - Lyric poetry is the most basic and omnipresent form of poetry. Not only that, but ever since the romantic period lyric has been the dominant form of poetry in the West. Once you realize that lyric poetry includes popular song, it’s obvious that it is at the center of human emotional life as it seeks expression in words. ([Location 93](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=93)) - Lyric poetry is the voice of the individual making sense of his or her experience. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=103)) - Sometimes lyric poems don’t use the pronoun I, but they are always expressive of an individual viewpoint—what some imagined person is saying or feeling or doing in the world. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=109)) - Lyric poetry is present in all times and places because it helps us live by expressing our experience and at the same time moving that experience a bit away from us—to the world of words, where it can be shaped or dramatized into meaning. When writing a poem, we turn our world into words and arrange them into patterns of pleasure or urgency or coherence. This second world created out of words is intensified and structured for expressive gratification. When reading a poem, we enter this second world—one that the poet’s imagination has created to express his or her vision of life and, indirectly, to connect with us. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=111)) - To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong: ([Location 124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=124)) - Closely related to this expressive function, yet even more important, is the fact that the writing of lyric poems helps to restabilize a self that has been destabilized by experience (inner or outer experience, or both). Lyric helps a poet restabilize by turning a personal experience into words and then applying the ordering principles that poetry and individual imagination abound with. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=128)) - Robert Frost identified as a main goal for poetry: “a momentary stay against confusion.” ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=131)) - In his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost puts it this way: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” The poet must go to his or her threshold and authentically experience the disorder (in this case, the disorder of emotion: tears and surprise) in order to move the reader. The poet is not and cannot be a puppet-master using language gifts to manipulate the reader while remaining personally detached—that is the realm of advertising and political rhetoric, not poetry. ([Location 651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=651)) - “the voice of the solitary that makes others less alone” (from Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Revolving Meditation”). ([Location 873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M64LQWU&location=873))