Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable. Pinsky's headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer's view of specific works, finding intense verbal music, wild imagination in matter-of-fact language, surrealist aplomb, and subtlety in meter.--From publisher description.

Freedom. Why I am not a painter / Frank O'Hara ; On painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling / Michelangelo (translated by Gail Mazur) ; Silence / Marianne Moore ; The old cloak / Anonymous ; Marriage / Gregory Corso ; Because I could not stop for death / Emily Dickinson ; Thoughts about the person from Porlock / Stevie Smith ; Fine work with pitch and copper / William Carlos Williams ; Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams / Kenneth Koch ; How we heard the name / Alan Dugan ; The glories of our blood and state / James Shirley ; Adlestrop / Edward Thomas ; Upon Appleton House / Andrew Marvell ; A description of the morning / Jonathan Swift ; The disappointment / Aphra Behn ; God's grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; Upon nothing / John Wilmot -- Listening. On love, on grief / Walter Savage Landor ; Betsabe's song / George Peele ; The pool / H.D. ; Eros Turannos / Edwin Arlington Robinson ; His excuse for loving / Ben Jonson ; My picture left in Scotland / Ben Jonson ; Upon M. Ben. Johnson / Robert Herrick ; For Margaret / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion ; Tamer and hawk / Thom Gunn ; from Songs to Joannes, I-III / Mina Loy ; To waken an old lady / William Carlos Williams ; An old man's winter night / Robert Frost ; To earthward / Robert Frost ; Nature, that washed her hands in milk / Walter Ralegh ; The house was quiet and the world was calm / Wallace Stevens ; Adam's curse / William Butler Yeats ; The soul selects her own society / Emily Dickinson -- Form. The cruel mother / Anonymous ; The man of double deed / Anonymous ; My prime of youth is but a frost of cares / Chidiock Tichborne ; Artfully adorned Aphrodite / Sappho (translated by Jim Powell) ; To a poor old woman / William Carlos Williams ; In time of plague / Thomas Nashe ; Sea rose / H.D. ; A question answered / William Blake ; from Jubilate Agno / Christopher Smart ; You that seek what life is in death / Fulke Greville ; Elegy for Philip Sidney / Fulke Greville ; from Howl, II / Allen Ginsberg ; Question / May Swenson ; The Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes ; The lullaby of a lover / George Gascoigne ; Church monuments / George Herbert ; During wind and rain / Thomas Hardy -- Dreaming things up. The weed / Elizabeth Bishop ; Love unknown / George Herbert ; The burning babe / Robert Southwell ; The self-unseeing / Thomas Hardy ; Captain Carpenter / John Crowe Ransom ; The big musical circus / Jorge de Lima (translated by Dudley Poore) ; The shooe tying and To God, on his sickness / Robert Herrick ; Madame La Fleurie / Wallace Stevens ; Epitaph on a hare / William Cowper ; Women / Louise Bogan ; Harlem happiness / Sterling Brown ; When I was fair and young / Elizabeth I ; Vigil strange I kept on the field one night / Walt Whitman ; Nick and the candlestick / Sylvia Plath ; The phoenix and the turtle / William Shakespeare ; David's lament for Saul and Jonathan / Bible, Samuel 2 ; Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll ; The lake isle of Innisfree / William Butler Yeats ; The lake isle / Ezra Pound ; The river-merchant's wife : a letter / Ezra Pound ; Methought I saw my late espousèd saint / John Milton ; from A woman young and old, IV : her triumph / William Butler Yeats ; Ode to a nightingale / John Keats ; Poetry / Marianne Moore ; On first looking into Chapman's Homer / John Keats. Freedom -- Listening -- Form -- Dreaming things up.