I am ignoring, as always, National Poetry Month, which begins this Thursday, while I go on celebrating poetry, day in and day out. Poetry is very private. Yet it's possible to find it -- responsiveness to poetry -- in almost any life, whether ignited by Dante or rap lyrics, scriptures or soap jingles.

There's peril in definitions. We all have standards -- and should. Lots of legitimate poetry bores me, offends me. Some enrages me. I find lots of published poetry too sentimental, simplistic, pretentious, vulgar, vicious, dumb.

It took me a long, stupid time to learn that despite such prejudice -- even if I were entirely right -- the stuff is still poetry.

Even the simplest, most pedestrian and transparent poetry has mystery about it. Why does it work? At its best, poetry cannot be explained. Entire volumes have been written on -- among other poems -- Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Much of that is extraordinarily intelligent. There can be little to debate, or to discover, about its importance as a manifesto of Modernism. But I could not, to save my life, explain why my entire body contracts when for the 2,342nd time I read that most final of all poetic lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

So, sure, you can go through all sorts of elaborate analytic processes. But, ultimately, to completely dissect a piece of poetry has the same effect as dissecting a frog -- you can get a good look at the insides of the thing. But it's still dead.

A million writers and teachers have been offering help with poetry since long before Homer. But here are recent volumes that I find to have considerable virtue:

"The Sounds of Poetry" by Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 129 pages, $16) was published last autumn. One of the most distinguished living American poets, Pinsky offers this rock-bottom advice to poets and readers alike: Pick a poem one loves, read it aloud, write it out in longhand, memorize some or all of it -- and think, think and think more. Then do that with another poem. And another. And more.

Early on, Pinsky declares he will pursue principles and effects in plain language, directly used. Then, astonishingly, he does just that. He unflinchingly takes up a number of intricate subtleties. But, overall, he insists, "If a good line [of poetry] contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle . . . should be discarded or amended." And even more strongly he asserts that "No instruction manual can teach as much as careful attention to the sounds in even one great poem."

Deftly, charmingly, he explores the bare-bones tools in five chapters -- "accent and duration," "syntax and line," "technical terms and vocal realities," "like and unlike sounds," "blank verse and free verse." Each is lean yet rich. The language is crisp, sure and confiding. Reading it is pleasurable. It demands attention, but it is captivating -- or was for me. I am notoriously distractible.

Pinsky addresses both the aspiring poet and the mesmerized reader. Both are beautifully served. If you are beset by yearning to write or to exult in reading poetry, you must read this exquisite, accessible little book.

"How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry" by Edward Hirsch (Harcourt Brace, 346 pages, $23). Hirsch teaches in Texas and has published four books of poetry, accumulating an impressive list of honors, including a MacArthur fellowship.

He includes an extensive glossary and reading lists I find clear-headed and inclusive -- a difficult marriage. This is a good place to learn to distinguish between hendecasyllabics (lines of 11 syllables, but there's a lot more to it) and hymns (just what you think, but there's more to this one, too).

He is generous with credits and references -- so if you begin with his straightforward book, you may be led to a life of reading poetry, and reading about it.

Hirsch is particularly good because he so respects the mystery: "There is always an element of secrecy and the occult in the relationship between the writer and the reader. The poem is an apparatus that requires a collusion. It is a message in a bottle." A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom.

"A Poet's Guide to Poetry" by Mary Kinzie (University of Chicago, 501 pages, $47). Kinzie has published five books of poetry and criticism and teaches at Northwestern University. This is volume one of a series of "Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing and Publishing." It is detailed, formal and scholarly. It stands as a comprehensive reference work and contains elaborate exercises for aspiring poets. But let the reader beware: This is not light reading.

"How to Read a Poem: and Start a Poetry Circle" by Molly Peacock (Riverhead, 224 pages, $21.95). A very enthusiastic and plain-spoken book that celebrates the author's lifelong love affair with poetry as much or more than poetry itself. It's lyrical and intellectually undemanding. It offers brief advice on starting a reading group -- and usefully sends the cyberliterate off to www.poetrysociety.org.

One other book, published last September, though not a guide to reading or writing poetry, strikes me as particularly worthy. It is "The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets" by David Lehman (Doubleday, 433 pages, $27.50), a powerful, passionate account of the lives and work of the New York school of poets in the early 1950s -- particularly John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler.

For anyone interested in the poetry of that period, it is a fascinating and well-told story. Not for the neophyte, but fluently readable, it is engagingly intertwined with the lives and work of the Abstract Expressionist visual artists of the same era and place.

Pub Date: 03/28/99