Contemporary Poetry: Search and Destroy

Destroy: I think in Britain, rather than any particular poet, I would destroy Heaney/Hughes anthologies 'The Rattle Bag' and 'The School Bag' - they present the history of Brit-poetry as relentless mud and blood, and are overused in schools.

I'm anti-canonical when it comes to literature (ie, I hate everything that was ever given to me by an English teacher. Except Pride and Prejudice, obv)

search- sandra cisneros

dos passos is someone i'm aquiring a taste for.

It's feasible that Scottish poetry 70s/80s/90s is as strong as any in the world in its breadth and invention: Burnside, Herbert, Crawford, Paterson, Jamie, Kay, Lumsden - even Duffy has a claim to Scottishness. I certainly can't imagine reeling off a similarly strong list of any other nation's poets (they are certainly stronger than similarly aged English writers). I think there's probably a very good book to be written about this generation's ascent and Scottish cultural self-confidence, devolution etc. If I had to choose one book it would probably be Don Paterson's 'Nil Nil' (Faber).

thought you would come up with that name. is that a 'search' or a 'destroy'?

and of course: b*n W**son to thread!

Destroy: Janet Paisley.

Acrostic Spider Poem

Sticky spider webs catching fly.
Poisonous spider creepy.
Insects fly in the shining webs.
Delicious spider have spotty.
Every spider make big webs.
Running around the country.
spider! spider! spider!

Contemplating the eagles that soared, I pondered thusly:
Buy two, get one free!
You penis pumper
I spy with my little eyes
Shit fuck bloody hell
Distance helps preserve beauty
Lost in the fleeting, almost an insignificance.

Sticky spider webs catching fly.
Poisonous spider creepy.
Insects fly in the shining webs.
Delicious spider have spotty.
Every spider make big webs.
Running around the country.
spider! spider! spider!''

that's the best incontemporary poetry I have seen. evah!

Curnow, amazingly, is still contemporary - only recently dead, & The Bells of St Babel's is up there with his best work (all seventy years of it, ha). Eggleton, Reeve, Bernholdt, Ascroft, Wood, Black & Howard off the top of my head are brilliant, & that's only people still/starting to publish. Baxter is already a mythic New Zealand figure despite being a mid-to-late 20th century poet - in the New Zealand imagination, he's the equivalent of Byron or the Beats.

(er, thanks david. also : ned+di, it's time to . . . er, die!)

Search: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0953456617/qid%3D1034593218/202-9940018-4047050

And for a sort of Cliffs Notes style site have a look here:

http://www.plagiarist.com

It has some nice samples of many poets and some peoples essays and commentary you might find handy if in a rush?

"Home After Three MOnths Away" is a nice poem about him returning home after being in a psych ward (self admitted) for 3 months. Lowell had a history of bipolar disorder, and also spent time in jail for being a concientous objector during WW2.

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/8003/

Also that my book "Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry" runs from about Wallace Stevens onwards.

(as it happens I'm a writer of poetry myself and have been published in local lit magazines, and while I dont regard myself anywhere near well read enough, I am a) not a teenage goth LJ "poet" and b) get very tired of Plath-bashing, its as old as this notion poetry stopped with her is).

While I dig your peeve, saying things like "someone who ACTUALLT participates in" is a little on the offensive side, soz.

Obviously as you say, you don't want to be wading through hundreds of poems to find your 'favourite' so you might have to be a little dishonest there... but I'm sure you could find something you liked without too much trouble.

Or have a look at The Poetry Thread on I Love Books.

But pressed to pick a contemporary poet I'd say check out Anselm Berrigan.

---
j-take both if you want.

Sorry about the jab at Hass. I had to read "Field Guide" in college and didn't like it that much.

My favorite poet is probably Elizabeth Bishop.

Or Emily Dickinson, who is still, somehow, incredibly modern.

The worst are "spoken word," "performance artists" like Penny Arcade, Maggie Estep. The kind of poets you'd see on MTV in the early '90s...or today at the Def Poetry Jam. Awful (awful!) stuff.

On the one hand, since when is poetry supposed to "matter"? And on the other hand, I think this is only true if you take a very narrow view of what poetry is.

But anyways, Anselm's pretty darn good. Saw him read up in Seattle a while back. It was pretty darn good. His father is one of my all time favorite poets, but he's been dead for a while now so he's not quite contemporary.

Re: spoken word/bnw...maybe what you say could be an interesting comparison, if spoken word didn't suck so bad. If you can listed on Penny Arcade and her ilk without cringing at the level of self-involvement and talentless ego involved, well...best of luck to you.

Anselm's definitely great...especially Zero Star Hotel. His dad died in '81, I believe. His mother, Alice Notley, is also a really great poet.

I have to admit, I haven't really read that much Alice Notley, and this is perhaps unfortunate. But Edmund is all right as well.

This falls flat for the simple reason that spoken word poetry brings no joy.

As I understand it, "spoken word poetry sucks" = something more like "most spoken word poets preach to the choir, play to the rafters, and generally out-Herod Herod while doing little of interest with the language in the most self-satisfied possible way.

This is not to say that most artists working in any genre are by and large uninteresting, grandiose, and certain to be irrelevant by this time next year. Which is what makes the good ones so precious, no?

PS to def/spoken word poets: bring on the instruments, real or otherwise.

How do you guys find new stuff to enjoy? So much of what I read in my occasional thumbing through journals is so sterile.

This falls flat for the simple reason that spoken word poetry brings no joy.

this is quite a thing to say!

Rolling Contemporary Poetry

oh, look at that.

this is quite a thing to say!

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, August 15, 2013

ha. i'd probably temper that a bit now. less immediately burnt on the scene, more appreciative of what it is vs disappointed in what its not.

that said ime most of the pleasure to be found in spoken word is still down to "mhm, preach it" but then the spoken word genre owes more to the pulpit than it usually cares to admit.

How do you guys find new stuff to enjoy?

dating a poet helps

being a poet is not helping :(

how to date poet

think i found it from the nytimes piece re: todays young poets as influenced by jack handey -- def recommend mark leidner - beauty was the case that they gave me

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61Q0%2BvnY-eL._SY300_.jpg

not that you're missing the reference jc but i'm pretty sure "murder was the case that they gave me" is not a Deep Thought ;)

the fact that he titled his book 'beauty was the case that he gave me' is already enough to prompt a "really, is that all you got" reaction tbh

So much of what I read in my occasional thumbing through journals is so sterile.

I find I have no patience for discovering new poetry by thumbing through literary and "little" magazines. That's why I am terrible at finding new stuff to enjoy. However, I do get great pleasure from the ILE poetry threads, which are never sterile. It's a shame we get so few poetry threads the past couple of years, but I haven't been a ball of fire at starting or sustaining them, so I can't complain. Much.

i've only thumbed through the last few issues but there's good stuff in this journal:

http://www.litmuspress.org/catalog/aufgabe/

jane yeh, THE NINJAS, people

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/04/a-diagnosis-of-the-maladies-of-poets-of-the-modern-age/

A Diagnosis of the Maladies of Poets of the Modern Age
By Patricia Lockwood

*

in which I answer the pressing question: what is wrong with us?

*

Choked on sunlight streaming through window

Loss of mental erections

Ate McDonald’s hamburger as a child and can’t stop feeling guilty about it

Thought so hard about his own father that he died

Memory problem — too many memories

Fatally injured while attempting to morph into an animal

Can’t ever cut beard or he loses his strength

Caught a tiny bit of sports in one eye; went blind

Wrote a Statement of Purpose and couldn’t stop; began shooting Statement of Purpose in forceful jets out of every orifice

Sat on a panel and it ruined her butt for all time

Compound linebreak in left leg

Dutch Elm disease, which the poet contracted while making out with trees

“Adult Soft-Spot Syndrome”

Drunk, always

Terrible growth in throat that dramatically recites her poems whenever she opens her mouth

Reverse Forrest Gump Disorder, where the person in question is very intelligent but never wants to move or do any sort of American duty

Caught rabies from a skunk, ROBERT LOWELL

Consumption

wow

oh they're teaching the listicle in MFA programs now

^^ buttruined for all time

Not really a poem, that

hm yes
hmmm

thrilled to get to be the person here who says Nothing Is Not A Poem

What is wrong? There are too goddamned many poems about poetry and the writing of poetry and the mystery of poetry and how poetry ought to be and how it works and how it fails and the marvel of reading poetry and appreciation of other poets' poems. Write poems about something besides poetry, you tail-chasing maniacs!

this poem was about poets. time to brush up on your close reading!

(hangs head in shame)

@ schlump, if I liked it and someone said it wasn't a poem I'd of course be manning the barricades saying that anything can be a poem

that poem is rad

she's great

*ejactulates in the form of a sonnet*

For those who have a spare minute, that piece basically elicits a response of: recognition, combined with humour and some thoughts, at an intensity of about 1.5 out of 10.

The thing is that the piece is based on the idea that there is something wrong ('maladies') with poets of our age, okay, so let's hear what the problem is ... well, it turns out that the problem isn't all that serious if it's the kind of thing you can joke about using faux-seriousness (like 'diagnosing the maladies of poets of our age') and puns.

And here I am, all geared up to hear what's wrong with poets of our age and excited to see what can be done with lists in a poem (it's been done a lot but you never know, let's be open-minded here), and I'm not getting much bang for my buck. The middlebrow levity of the piece is as much of a contemporary poetry cliche as the nature writing and poems about the author's father that it seeks to criticise.

Caveats, a totally serious account of the great curse affecting poetry today would probably be worse, and the boundary between the trivial and the light touch is different for different readers ... but really I'd like to see someone taking the risk of actually trying to write a poem, I think, even though this is likely to end in outright failure

you're reading the poem wrong, trying to make it do something it's not trying to do

xp And I've probably gone on about this before but 'anything can be a poem' (like 'anything can be art') is basically a one neat trick you can use to shut down conversations about poetry and crucially doesn't tell us anything about why I should bother paying any more attention to that poem, than to the D key on my keyboard here, or the empty coke can next to my laptop or whatever

"my cat could paint that"

waterface: no, I get what it's doing and am not in the business of trying to get poems to be other than what they are - it can be a great example of its species (which we're probably obliged to recognise, dunno?) but that doesn't mean anyone's obliged to like it

The thing is that the piece is based on the idea that there is something wrong ('maladies') with poets of our age, okay, so let's hear what the problem is ... well, it turns out that the problem isn't all that serious if it's the kind of thing you can joke about using faux-seriousness (like 'diagnosing the maladies of poets of our age') and puns.

The poem is not based on this idea.

If each of those lines in the poem were comments on an ILX thread called 'ITT we diagnose maladies of the poets of our age' I'd probably put 'haha' or even 'otm' under most of them but no-one on ILX calls the threads 'poems', they're just threads

so wait are you saying you would rather have a poem, a full fledged erect poem, that people are OBLIGED to like? that would do it for you?

if there's one thing i like, it's what i'm obliged to. o man. obligation.

xxp Its subtitle would suggest that it kind of is?

j. nope where did I give that impression?

the tenor of your complaint seems to be WHY SHOULD I HUH (go back and look at what you've said)

so it was you, and your words, that gave me that impression

Ah no, what I was going for was more 'yeah, exactly, we shd be reading poems on their own terms and expecting it to be Tristan Corbiere or whatever if it isn't that, but sometimes a perfectly good X isn't what you need and arguably Xs in general are not quite as good as Ys'

*and not expecting

i think i basically agree with cardamon but i'd say it's more an intensity of 5.5 to 6

would anyone be up for a thread where we post, sequentially, once a week, every poem in The Best American Poetry 2013 and talk about what's wrong with it

"caught rabies from a skunk, ROBERT LOWELL" -- is this meant to be, like, a grocery bag thing? but also: for whom is lowell 'poets of our time'? -- it seems like this is tossed off in a way that makes me not want to overthink it, but the types it addresses seem like straw men, and not even current ones

what's wrong with just experiencing the language for language's sake, and not worrying about what it means

I suppose the idea is that all these poets sat at the feet of Robert Lowell and then based on his poem skunk hour went off to find some skunks, because, well, if Robert Lowell says they have an epiphanic quality it's worth a go right? But in the event they just got bitten/caught rabies ... yeah, ROBERT LOWELL, thanks a bunch.

And yeah thomp I'd be up for that thread but not just to say what's wrong with each poem

p.s. 'This Poem is About My Father' guy is definitely a current type of poet, but who today is making out with trees?

cases for the defence will be admitted

i think 'making out w trees' has broader readings than just the sort of ppl who write about how great trees are but idk

Thoreau? 'Hippies'? Yeah idk either

ppl who want to be ecstatic about things

it's almost as if trees… and sunlight… and animals… are some sort of stand-in for something else… some thing, some realm… i was never any good at poetry though…

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/04/six-facts-about-pens/

^^ was waiting for that to make an appearance

fwiw, I've seen cuneiform tablets and I would offer this emendation:

3. ouch

4. OUCH

5. YEEEOUCH!!

6. BLOODY FUCKING HELL, GET THAT AWAY FROM ME!