/lit/ - Literature

>>17972568
If you can't find something you like in here, odds are you just don't enjoy poetry. (I own the 5th edition, which came out around 2005...I can vouch for the 5th). Norton breaks things down into eras and genres--you can jump around and build a sense for what you may gravitate toward. (Check out Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Whitman). If you end up finding a poet you like make sure you get something that isn't just a greatest hits (i.e. get individual books or collected works that order things the way they were published...you'll get an idea of how things hold together and a deeper sense of the what a given poet meant to express)

I had a friend who got into poetry after reading Charles Bukowski. (He's very easy to read and understand and quite a few of his poems read as short stories). I'd recommend "What Matters Most Is How You Walk Through the Fire," "You Get So Alone Sometimes It Just Makes Sense," "Searching Through The Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way," and "Slouching Towards Nirvana" (Slouching is his reflections after he's gotten famous so read it after the others). A lot of his books are grabbed together by the publishers (especially the later ones)...but with him, it doesn't matter as much as other poets (i.e. there's basically just before fame and after fame).

A general intro that's super easy to read is "How to Read Poetry Like a Professor." It's very light and might give you a deeper appreciation for the form. (If you want something denser, but a lot less fun to read, check out "The Book of Forms.")

If you’re serious about understanding the art, read the Norton along with something like The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. If you want to dabble, pick up a best American poetry anthology and see who you like. Don’t just read poets because they’re considered great, either study to understand why they’re great, or read poets that naturally speak to you.

Does anyone happen to have the pdf/epub/mobi to the Norton Anthology of Poetry? I tried downloading a bunch but none of them were properly formatted for my kindle. If not, what is a similar anthology I can download?