Pinsky's "prosody" book is just what Dana Gioia
called it--"a gesture rather than a book." It's all
of about 50 pages or so, and widely spaced out prose at
that. It also contains a pretty good selection of
snippy putdowns about rhyme and meter and the names
of feet, etc. Ugh.
Amazon? Who the hell knows? Pinsky was at a reading
in Cambridge in '95 when his "Inferno" was lit, and he claimed to the audience at the time that he actually had a pretty good grasp of medieval Ialian AND that the Ciardi
translation was not very good (he said this latter on a radio station in Boston).
Pinsky is NO friend of meter or rhyme.
As for Merwin, he's no freind of good poetry.
Like Kinnell, he seems to think it's perfectly
OK to translate a rhymed, metrical poem into free
verse--and leave out the punctuation along the way.
As for Hass, good grief, he's an old friend of Pinsky's, so of course he approves of his work. But who the hell thinks Hass is a good poet?
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