Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology - Tapa dura

The selections in this anthology were chosen form the personal letters of thousands of Americans who responded to Robert Pinsky's invitation to write to him about their favorite poems. Some poems are memories treasured in the mind since childhood; some crystallize the passion of love or recall the trail of loss and sorrow. The poems and poets in this anthology--from Sappho to Lorca, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Bluck, and Allen Ginsberg--are poems to be read aloud and memorized, poems to be celebrated as part of our nation's cultural inheritance. Accompanying the poems are comments by people who speak not as professional critics but as passionate readers of various ages, professions and regions. This anthology, in a manner unlike any other, discloses the rich and vigorous presence of poetry in American life at the millennium and provides a portrait of the United States through the lens of poetry.

Maggie Dietz is the Favorite Poem Project's director. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Robert Pinsky is the author of ten collections of poetry including, most recently, At the Foundling Hospital. His translation The Inferno of Dante won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His brief guide The Sounds of Poetry is used in acting classes. As a three-term United States Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans shared their favorite poems. That project gave rise to three previous anthologies, Americans' Favorite Poems, An Invitation to Poetry, and Singing School. Pinsky lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Boston University. Robert Pinsky is the author of ten collections of poetry including, most recently, At the Foundling Hospital. His translation The Inferno of Dante won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His brief guide The Sounds of Poetry is used in acting classes. As a three-term United States Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans shared their favorite poems. That project gave rise to three previous anthologies, Americans' Favorite Poems, An Invitation to Poetry, and Singing School. Pinsky lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Boston University.