Join Brad Leithauser to discuss Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry.
Brad E. Leithauser is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he is now on faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He is an alumnus of the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Leithauser is also an award-winning poet and MacArthur Fellow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, The New Yorker, and The New Criterion.
Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry is the product of a lifetime of trying to figure out why poems take the forms they do. A MacArthur Fellow from 1983-1988, Brad was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland in 2005 for his service in promoting Nordic literature. Leithauser, a former drama critic for Time, has a special interest in music and musical theater, and many of the examples chosen for Rhyme’s Rooms are drawn from American popular song. Rhyme’s Rooms is both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail. The book has already gone into a second printing.
Read this glowing review of his book from the Washington Post.
Brad writes: “I’m hoping to attract the specialist: the practicing poet, the high-minded critic, the esteemed professor. But none of these is the primary target of this book. I want to lure here, more than anyone else, the reader who loves words and literature but maybe feels some trepidation, and a little nervous resentment, as well as various unvoiced cravings, on confronting a poem on a page.
“Over the years, a passion for 20th-century American popular song has led me to publish essays on Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, Stephen Sondheim, et al. In the following pages, I often look to them for illumination and example. For many readers of advancing years, these have been the modern poets most closely lived beside, and loved beside. We all owe them, and I’m happily seeking to repay a long-standing debt.”
“I mean this book as a modest dose of medicine—supplied to a literary culture not always fully appreciative of those solitary figures, besieged and fumbling, who spend their days with poetic structures, pondering how some small handful of words might be grouped, or regrouped, or grouped once more, to engineer a satisfying line.”
Signed copies of Brad’s book will be available for sale after the event.