Rolling Contemporary Poetry

Because the world needs this thread.

So, to start off, what's the best new book of poetry published so far this year?

I will be following this thread keenly, but have little to contribute to it. Read a couple of new John Burnside poems that I quite liked the other day - has he got a new collection out? (f'ing lame I know - but it's all I got)

While we are all waiting for the contemporary poetry to arrive, ILB'ers may want to while away the time reading the many minor gems in The Hitherto Uncollected Poems of Beth Parker: A tribute.

^^^^^very, very otm

I mean the best new poem I've seen all year was by an ILXor (elmo argonaut) so like

I don't think a Burnside collection is due yet - one last year iirc. He is very good, isn't he? I always forget about him when I'm thinking about contemp British poetry - I take him for granted a bit, I think – feel like in the platonic issue of the LRB (alongside a diary report from Afghanistan, Tom Shippey on something Medieval, James Wood on an important writer, etc, etc) there are two knotty poems by John Burnside about taking a walk at night in the cold.

Collections I'm meaning to get hold of: Peter Porter's new Selected (always admired him – sucker for formal adeptness + urbanity + his inside/outside relationship with The Tradition – but didn't read much from the last decade), the new Muldoon (feel like I've got to, slightly resent feeling like I've got to, will probably enjoy it once I'm in).

Stuff I've seen around - liking the poems Mark Ford's been publishing recently, but his new collection isn't out till next year. Shocked to be impressed by a Nick Laird poem in the TLS. I've really seen nothing before that's made me believe he's the real thing (tbh saw him as the fag end of the Norn Ireland line, ambition cursed with a middling ear and bad eye) but this had a bit of density & weight.

Here end the dispatches from a p conventional sensibility.

I have high hopes for Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season which Amazon are in the process of sending to me (along with MacNiece's Autumn Journal and Hecht's Later Poems - not sure why I didn't get round to getting hold of these last two sooner).

Think Don Paterson's book on Shakespeare's Sonnets looks very entertaining too.

I will be following this thread keenly, but have little to contribute to it.

this.

also link to elmo's poem lj?

(I think I might use this thread to remind myself of stuff as well, so:)

I should prob read that Patrick McGuinness collection, Jilted City. I've never really clicked with him in the past, and what I've seen from it hasn't made me that excited, but reviews make it sound like it'd work for me if I had a bit more patience.

After a long homeward talk with the man himself from a reading I have purchased Jeff Hilson's 'In The Assarts' and the damn thing is extraordinary

in the asshats

gonna tell him that & say it was u

in the asshats

(I am Spartacus!)

HOOS is legion

also pope

I read a fair bit of contemp poetry these days but I don't know how to talk about contemporary poetry & feel like a lot of the discourse around it is so very many leagues beneath it -- beneath the good stuff anyway; there is loads of lousy stuff that's pretty much exactly on the level of the discourse -- that the vocabulary to describe reading it is lacking; I don't know how to discuss Jean Valentine, for example, who strikes me as a poet of incredible & v. understated power: when people talk about "rhythms" w/r/t ametrical verse, for example, I want to say, what the fuck could you possibly mean by "rhythm"? anyway, Chelsea Minnis, she kicks ass

it's 'cadence' not 'rhythm' these days iirc

yeah I'm still callin bs on that

just say what you mean, "voibe," and be done w/it

I basically completely wing it & use vocabulary I'd previously have reserved for music when discussing modern poetry I like - the problem is often whether to approach the text as a machine or as a narrative

like "cadence" is a specific reference to the movement of a metrical line. no coincidence that the term is used in horseback riding; it has to do with the movement of the feet. take the feet away, there's no cadence. imo

I have reconfigured 'cadence' like the busy little modernist I am, also I am throwing 'syllabography' into the ring

some say cavalier, I say visionary

do ppl say cavalier

posting 16-page modernist-situationist epic to ilxor.com = cavalier, let me roll w/ the defenders of king charles I, struth

blowetry

poetrill

I wrote a poem today and while I was writing it a dude in a yellow speedo ran by towards the ocean holding flippers and I was like man I should do that instead but I kept writing

ur a tru bro

Lately…

Maggot - Paul Muldoon. Read through about a month ago, didn't leave a huge impression. Liked that first combat/cancer sequence, but overall I'm feeling a bit worn out by the Muldoon music: that rhyme game again, verse always twists into the same patterns of unexpectedness. A step back from that big poem at the end of Horse Latitudes maybe? Anyway, he's interesting, always distinctive, etc etc but I don't really like his verse that much. Which reminds me

Oraclau/Oracles - By my bedside, not reading quickly. I dunno. I sort of like prozac comeback Geoffrey Hill, that odd dense/garrulous texture he hits a lot, the urgency, & I remain a sucker for his canonical sonics; but feel like I'm still sitting outside it a bit. Maybe I'll finish it tonight, report back a bit more concretely.

Waiting to start Hot White Andy by Keston Sutherland. Intrigued; said somewhere before that I wasn't wild on Antifreeze, that I'm a bit sceptical of most stuff that's Prynne-marked (Like he, his style seem a cerebral revolutionary cause, probably the only one in British poetry at the moment; the non-Prynne stuff I've seen mostly doesn't really feel the allure or power of lyric, memorable speech, any trad or popular def of poetry); but I liked the youtube of his reading, & I guess I think more interesting stuff will come from the stony ground of Cambridge poets than the damp pastures elsewhere.

Get that impression because I've been reading Identity Parade to catch up on British poetry (my current loo book). F'k me, what a shower. Hit rate feels far worse than the old Bloodaxe New Poetry from 93 (previous thing of this sort), really meh intros to the poets and the volumes. But k.i.p., k.i.p., so of ppl I hadn't read before quite like Mark Waldron, Melanie Challenger, a few others.

Like he, his style seem a cerebral revolutionary cause, probably the only one in British poetry at the moment

ronggggggggggggggg

get thee some sean bonney. lovely guy too. and then check out chris goode, jennifer cooke, o god so many others...

lol @ me pimping my irl homies

also jeff hilson, as said above. wau.

I'm a bit sceptical of most stuff that's Prynne-marked

So am I. But when it works it can be scorching. Mate of mine, Ian Heames, is progressing towards this end. When it fails, it's so many discrete images flashing by at lightning speed for no apparent end.

oops, double use of 'end' - also erroneous use of it at all - poetry doesn't have an end, it participates in a wider flow

:(

but still, Prynnian wank is egregious and barely listenable, barely fun even, so you gotta hit your marks

fair enough, I do tend to be a bit undiscriminating when it comes to that side of things, so call anything that's in the difficult British Poetry Revival line (Barque stuff, all that) Prynne-y. That's v lazy of me, journalistic, so yes fair enough. I'll have a look at those sorts you mention; Bonney seems alright on first glance.

God i don't know though. Touch of the perpetual manifesto writer.

i been digging james richardson's 'by the numbers' esp the aphorisms:

137. Out walking, I think of that face I love or some scene of awful
embarrassment and stop dead in my tracks, as if I had to choose
between moving and being moved.

ne1 have any opinion on foer's 'tree of codes' ? i usually tend to enjoy palimpsest and experimental book forms (i just picked up this one in fact) but the die cutting seems and the resulting flimsy-ass-these-are-soo-gonna-tear pages seems clumsy and put me off

sheen's korner y/n lol

saw louise gluck read last night.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Oi3ehb2uRrc/TKsgIOPpCnI/AAAAAAAAB0I/eDk4awT-_MM/s640/gluck1.jpg

i am reading a copy of mark halliday's jab, pub. 2002. it was in my amazon save-for-later list and i have no memory of what led me to place it there. i am having trouble with it, mainly because in register/idiom he is v. close to yoni wolf of why?, which means i keep hearing everything half-rapped for a line or two and then get lost when there's no rhythm to make work

viz.

if you were standing frozen in sweated confusion
at the Personal Furnishings rack
in a giant department store five days before Christmas
wearing a woolly jacket that belonged to someone long gone
and trying not to seem dangerous
under silver and scarlet decorations with no conception
of adequate reply to tremendous departures

This, though, I like, although it is a bit ILMish I 'spose

Trumpet Player, 1963

When Jan and Dean recorded "Surf City"
there must have been one guy—

I see this trumpet player (was there even a horn section in that song?
Say there was)—

I see this one trumpet player with his tie askew
or maybe he's wearing a loose tropical-foliage shirt
sitting on a metal chair waiting
for the session to reach the big chorus
where Jan and Dean exult
Two girls for every boy
—and he's thinking
of his hundred nights on his buddy Marvin's hairy stainy sofa
and the way hot dogs and coffee make a mud misery
and the way one girl is far too much and besides
he hasn't had the one in fourteen months, wait,
it's fifteen now.
Surfing—what life actually lets guys ride boards
on waves? Is it all fiction? Is it a joke?
Jan and Dean and their pal Brian act like it's a fine, good joke
whereas this trumpet player thinks it's actually shit,
if anybody asked him, a tidal wave of shit.

tho' it occurs to me that "actually" is functioning, in my head, the way chris addison or stewart lee might use it: that this switch in register is occurring largely in my head to the particular mode of comedy that isn't quite good enough to justify how bound up it all is in the self-presentation of every British male I know under thirty.

Which is probably irrelevant. I don't know. I half-like this guy. But "what life actually lets guys ride boards / on waves" almost gets to something, & that could remedy this poem, except that it falls so flatly there, is so bluntly stated, that it just kind of sits in the middle of the poem and gets in the way.

I like Halliday a lot, especially his first book Little Star, which was embarrassed/confessional/honest in a funny way. He has a kind of casualness that may have been fresher in the world before blogs and message boards.

Just started reading lots of Anne Carson which has been consistently blowing me away.

I like Halliday a lot, especially his first book Little Star, which was embarrassed/confessional/honest in a funny way. He has a kind of casualness that may have been fresher in the world before blogs and message boards.

There's something about his assumption of a stance of resignedness that I find weirdly offputting: that might be part of it.

Meanwhile, today the British poet laureate told us that "poetry is the original text messaging" -- also that "If you look at rapping, for example, a band like Arctic Monkeys uses lyrics in a poetic way."

Has anyone read Philip Levine, the new U.S. laureate? I didn't realise they had such sharply defined terms for the job, over there.

He's one of the 1928 poets (also Merwin, Ashbery, Kinnell, and more. This one and this are representative of his work. Depending on the poem, reads like bad Whitman or great Whitman. Easy reading, in terms of flow and clarity.

i never mentioned on this thread that i'd read lynn emanuel's noose and hook, which i thought was kind of fantastic

Maggot - Paul Muldoon. Read through about a month ago, didn't leave a huge impression. Liked that first combat/cancer sequence, but overall I'm feeling a bit worn out by the Muldoon music: that rhyme game again, verse always twists into the same patterns of unexpectedness. A step back from that big poem at the end of Horse Latitudes maybe? Anyway, he's interesting, always distinctive, etc etc but I don't really like his verse that much

is this the one with the sort-of sonnet-sequence with the repeating verse? yeah that sucked

I need recommendations! The last poetry I read was a collection of (Dante Gabriel) Rossetti sonnets.

Then you might like Charles Sinker's poem about, actually to Parkinson's. Mark's context becomes poetic too, under the pressure of communication
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2012/02/music-poetry-parkinsons-disease/

I'm a poet, you guys should read me. Google "crucial spawl"

Read a fair bit of Hugo Williams's Collected Poems; always found him sporadically impressive but a bit footling before, then read that poem from a few LRBs back, 'From the Dialysis Ward', and thought it brilliant. Reading the Collected, felt I was closer to right the first time, tho' I underestimated him a bit - gifted, first collection terrific, but really rapidly slides - fairly dull poet of domesticity, prosy line, and a removed/poised patrician thing that grates. Also half his poems are about his dad, he should let that go. Feel like his most fertile territory is poetry about being quite handsome, this is an unusual topic.

Hey I'm a poet too, read me, google "yeah right"

You seem to speak sarcastically, as if being a poet were some unattainable height. On the contrary, a poet is just a person who writes poetry. There are great poets, good poets, intermittently competent poets, rather bad poets and horrible crapulous poets. btw, writing one poem is not enough to qualify as a poet. At a minimum you have to work at it and care about poetry.

just finished Charles Bernstein's latest, Recalculating. never read Bernstein before; found the book bracing, challenging, and (ultimately) wonderful. what else should I read?

Agree with you Aimless on all points. Sarcasm intended, though I thought Raymond's post was like a poem worthy of pointing out (though I didn't google "crucial..." Did you?) I also think every poem written is implicitly saying Hey I'm a poet read me, and is greeted with (and rightly so) Yeah right

btw, Charles Bernstein is, I think, a waste of time as a critic but an an intermittently competent poet. Read Girly Man

I also think every poem written is implicitly saying Hey I'm a poet read me

An interesting critical stance, but not one I expect to take the world by storm.

DOES ANYONE HAVE AN OPINION ON PATRICIA LOCKWOOD oops capslock

http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/two-poems-by-patricia-lockwood

bernstein is pretty good at both criticism and poetry but girly man is maybe his worst thing ever, get a copy of 'all the whisky in heaven: selected poems' (been remaindered i think?), have a flick through 'attack of the difficult poems' and 'content's dream' if you have access to a library with that sort of thing, particularly 'recantorium' in the former

one of the poems in the new book is a list of the words in girly man, in descending order of frequency

I got the selected, haven't done more than flip thru it yet tho

more patricia lockwood, sort of

http://www.thingx.tv/articles/mad-men-poetry-recap-season-6-premiere-2335/

Sorry guys

I suck at self promo

i flipped through the new bernstein the other day in st marks bookshop and it didn't really "click", unfortunately, but i want to return to it at some point. i really like the poetry of ben lerner, and have read two of his collections: the lichtenberg figures and angel of yaw. they touch on theoretical questions, and in this way show the influence of the Language poets (i suppose), but for the most part work really well just as lyrics. There is a lot of humor in his work, and an everpresent mood of sublimated melancholy... the prematurely resigned sadness of the precocious artist. Here is a link to some poems from the Lichtenburg Figures (2004): http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/248/ifrom-i-the-lichtenberg-figures-ben-lerner Lerner's 2011 novel "Leaving the Atocha Station" is very enjoyable too.

Hey, a good friend of mine has an essay in today's NY Times about the influence of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts on a new generation of American poets.

that is a good essay and i should probably read some of those poets

that lerner poem upthread is really good! that is all

or 'those lerner poems', i'm not really sure

they are separate poems. the lichtenburg figures is a sonnet sequence actually. but thanks, yeah, he is one of my favorite contemporary poets. if you liked those you should check out his novel too, which had me laughing out loud at several points.

Damn!

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBK1sjr-MT8

I said, damn!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBK1sjr-MT8

not watching that

was it a requirement of the form that they address their damn poems to famous women, what's that about

i saw louise mathias read last weekend and think she is pretty wonderful - there's a small sampling of her stuff here:

http://home.earthlink.net/~pero/louise-mathias.html

thanks for linking that jack handey article, eazy

Emily Berry's "Dear Boy" is absolutely fantastic, btw

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/media/landays.html#feature

What's a good anthology of recent/contemporary American poetry?

the examples in that jack handey article sound a lot more like npr moth radio hour bits than deep thoughts

probably not the right thread for it but, what do people think of jorie graham

Have never liked a Jorie Graham poem, but in each case you could def come up with a list of interesting things the poem could be said to be doing.

haha yeah i see that

I'm co-signing with cardamon's comment.

that's kind of how i feel about all poetry tho

I saw Jorie Graham give a talk and a Q&A once and she was lucid and compelling, and I was like, Oh! I like her when she speaks directly!

yup, with cardamon here. I think of her as epitome of in-the-academy US poetry.

got bought John Burnside's The Hunt in the Forest for birthday. Clearly a good poet, finding the repeatedly used tools (woods, darkness, illness, slaughter) a bit tiresome. It's enjoyable, but there aren't many 'Yes!' bits really. I like best his less freighted depictions of nature - esp winter, drizzle, that sort of thing, and he's at his best in this where extremes of darkness, death, insubstantiality, dying etc are replaced by things attenuated by... well, atmospheric dreariness I guess. I like his general approach, and the pastoral of cancer, illness and sensations of light and gloom, but it somehow doesn't quite hit the mark a lot of the time. Still good, still very pleased to get it.

yup, with cardamon here. I think of her as epitome of in-the-academy US poetry.

― woof, Friday, 21 June 2013 09:35 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry?? not that i disagree with you, the biggest fan of hers i know is a hahvahd guy

i don't know i spelt it like that, he's not one of those harvard guys

I Watched a Snake

hard at work in the dry grass
behind the house
catching flies. It kept on
disappearing.
And though I know this has
something to do

with lust, today it seemed
to have to do
with work. It took it almost half
an hour to thread
roughly ten feet of lawn,
so slow

between the blades you couldn't see
it move. I'd watch
its path of body in the grass go
suddenly invisible
only to reappear a little
further on

black knothead up, eyes on
a butterfly.
This must be perfect progress where
movement appears
to be a vanishing, a mending
of the visible

by the invisible--just as we
stitch the earth,
it seems to me, each time
we die, going
back under, coming back up . . .
It is the simplest

stitch, this going where we must,
leaving a not
unpretty pattern by default. But going
out of hunger
for small things--flies, words--going
because one's body

goes. And in this disconcerting creature
a tiny hunger,
one that won't even press
the dandelions down,
retrieves the necessary blue-
black dragonfly

that has just landed on a pod . . .
All this to say
I 'm not afraid of them
today, or anymore
I think. We are not, were not, ever
wrong. Desire

is the honest work of the body,
its engine, its wind.
It too must have its sails--wings
in this tiny mouth, valves
in the human heart, meanings like sailboats
setting out

over the mind. Passion is work
that retrieves us,
lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,
it fastens us
to sturdier stuff
no doubt.

presented without comment except that obviously the indenting is not meant to be like that.

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry??

wcw!! at least then.

still riding that horse eh

shd I read emily berry / sam riviere / nick laird?

not sure I didn't get burned by sidereal

gonna ride that horse as long as eliot stans exist!!

eliot was so not in the academy he was working for lloyds of london or whatever

✌_✌ OTM, as per, re: Emily Berry's Dear Boy, above. Delighted to see the hitherto ineffable charms of post-swim vending machine Wheat Crunchies and the ball sack of Michaelangelo's David finally effed in verse.

i suppose the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry is whatever posthumous bukowski collection came out this year

-

stevie i'm not sure those words in that order made sense

tumblr poets

i should have ever finished/sent you that collection of fantasy poems

haha yes. i think there is kind of a crossover between 'poets who have tumblrs' and 'mfa poets' tho tho i dont know if that is what you mean by 'tumblr poets'

i guess another answer is 'weird twitter' |:

In-the-academy poets tend to have a great deal in common, therefore it is a simpler matter to select an epitome from among that herd. Exoacademic poets are few and must travel strange paths to anything like prominence, so they share much less in common. Each one who attains any readership reigns in his own little kingdom apart. Bukowski is a good example.

I want to read the Berry myself - from a glance it seems really good.
I liked the Sam Riviere collection.
Every now and again I read something and think Laird might be alright, but actually really most of what I see by him reinforces my first instinct, from many years ago when I read a longish poem of his in a student anthology, which was that's he's not very good (tho' he makes all the right gestures) - solid box-ticker, too faber, idk quite what I'm trying to say.

which american poet is the epitome of not-in-the-academy u.s. poetry??

haha good q; and aimless otm I guess about various paths of poets outside the academy.

I think you can have a teaching post and not be an 'academic poet' in quite the sense we're talking about - but I am curious, which name US poets of the last thirty years say have not held a poetry/creative writing position somewhere in higher ed? (presumably but not necessarily on principle)

shd I read emily berry / sam riviere / nick laird?

Berry is I think better than Riviere, and also the most approachable, definitely the one you read if you read just one. So much of Riviere's charm for me is in the brattishness of his poetic persona, this feeling of the person who is still a precocious child in their late 20s. So he is clever and funny and mean but there is always (intentionally, in a way that i reckon a lot of time has been put into) this edge of petulance and slapdashness. Berry is more willing to use the conventional strengths - lyricism, tenderness, visible craft, the delicately chiming juxtaposition of images - and so the personality of them is less startling, especially as she's often writing stories rather than personal reflection.

but like both of them have got me back into poetry in a rly strong way so they are first in my heart

I have never read Laird.

i don't think he sits well with them. Feels like the previous generation.

the next generation is Lamp's fantasy poems i hope

I'd never heard of Patricia Lockwood before today, but damn.

she is so good always and she is amazing there.

she is such a well-turned writer and so sharp and apt of phrase, it's amazing to see that acuteness used on a poem with a warm body in it.

and it's kind of amazing to watch the retweets and comments rack up, the goodwill and admiration she's getting -- i feel so strongly that she deserves them. she had a poem published in the lrb last week too, which i was super happy about.

holy shit

Patricia Lockwood ‏@TriciaLockwood 5h
The real final line of "Rape Joke" is this. "You don't ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want."

i don't really know anything about contemp poetry but read that earlier and was pretty blown away by it. kudos.

Holy shit

i like that poem a lot.

i like how she maintains her wit and composure while writing about an issue that is so sensitive, and with righteous anger, turning everything around and revealing callous people with dehumanizing attitudes to be the real "humorless" ones.

shd I read emily berry / sam riviere / nick laird?

You want the Carcanet New Poetries series.

The three mentioned above are 'dazzling' poets - hyped-up, london-based, references to cool contemporary stuff, occasional moments of angst, but not really actually very good poems tbh, tbf.

Some of Riviere can be found here:

http://clinicpresents.com/2011/07/22/a-new-sincerity-81-austerities-sam-riviere/

Of the Faber new poets pamphlets series the only one that's stuck around for me is Fiona Benson. She was doing a PhD about the character of Ophelia at the time, and you can tell, but there was a strong current and drive to the poems.

Of the others I found Underwood's to be an effective and friendly persona I didn't mind reading, but altogether a little too much like a young version of Poetry Society-sanctioned 'Contemporary British Poetry'. Martinez de las Rivas was the kind of poetry that puts people off experimental poetry. There was another Fiona (I think) who had titles like 'German Phenomenology makes me want to run naked through North London' and had a poem about 'My dad used to read me Kafka's short fiction at breakfast'.

I believe I've made my feelings clear about the American 'hip lit' or 'alt lit' or whatever it's called in the Tao Lin thread, but there's a particular blend of boredom and revulsion you get watching young British poets and a great British publishing house trying to catch that wave ... and not even being very good at it.

Also what do people think of this flavourwire list, any finders, any keepers?

http://flavorwire.com/406950/23-people-that-make-you-pay-attention-poetry/2

oh god of course there exists a clicky slideshow of young poets with minimal text, dear internet what alchemy you have wrought.

i have been reading the nathan hamilton-edited "dear world and everyone in it" new poetry in the uk anthology - a lot of it is just maddening, but some digs in and makes me stop with startled satisfaction. One poem I read while flicking through, felt the chime of this-feels-right, and then felt vaguely irritated with myself when I found out it was by Luke Kennard, like ugh, of course it is, how typical of me, seems i have a type.

Is dear world worth getting?

a clicky slideshow of young poets with minimal text

True in so many ways

the introduction to dear world is a tour de force

not necessarily a good one, but a tour de force nonetheless

i don't really know! i borrowed rather than bought it and so i can approach it w/o sunk costs to consider -- it is satisfying to me that it should contain so much stuff i dislike, because that reminds me that there is so much new poetry going on and i really don't have to care about or like all of it, but obviously that does not render it v.f.m.

I spose what annoys me about the current UK Poetry Kidz isn't actually the poetry itself. It seems like not a good look to get angry because someone wrote a poem, even if I don't like it. It's not like they're having the good life handed to them either, the royalties aren't like having a secure job in finance and even someone of Todd Swift's stature can still have a bottle of urine thrown on him by members of The Wanted as he walks through London on the way from his gym to his flat.

It's more the efforts on the part of established people in poetry writing and publishing to canonise this (very particular slice of) new poetry as 'The' new poetry. I mean, picking up and reading all those Faber pamphlets really isn't equivalent to 'seeing what young poets are writing today', as per the line so many reviewers have gone with.

A great claim is being made for them - not even a claim of potential but of achievement. The claim might not be being made by the writing itself, but man is it ever annoying reading Sean O'Brien and the rest of the creepy coupe when they pretend that Riviere, Berry, etc, are 'the' young generation of poets writing today.

Not least because it's bollocks that an established poet in the UK should need Faber pamphlets to show what was 'going on'. Anyway, I'll be over here with my lamp looking for one good man.

the clever ones tend to emigrate

i'm fairly new to the world of contemporary poetry but having read almost nothing but it for the past two months i would just like to say that lyn hejinian's 'my life' is totally stunning

i wrote a chunk of my ma thesis on a hejinian i never finished /:

she's really good, though, i think. i think ilx user 'j.' has been reading my life for plural years. hejinian's theoryish book is a good book to look at if you're getting involved in that like whole thing. i think most Contemporary Poet types would think of her as being quite old hat but i mean, those people.

yes i have.

i have yet to finish it.

but each time i do better. sustained attention to it pays dividends.

i would like to think that if ilx user 'the pinefox' were to read it he would have reservations about its intelligibility but grudgingly admit that it really is something.

i tried to teach it once. boy did i have to try to back out of that.

while browsing the poetry section at B***** & N****, I picked up a book by Brian Russell (whose name is uncannily similar to that of a friend of mine), The Year of What-Next--it is about terminal illness, but in a good way

sorry, that's The Year of What Now

I'm not finished reading it yet. also, I've been drunk

anyone read glyn maxwell's recent book on poetry?

c sharp major do you have any kind of personal history or animus w/r/t young british poets or is this a purely unmotivated distaste? this is not meant to be a loaded question, i am just curious

i have read hamilton's intro to the new poetry anthology and like, of course this guy's pop-culture touchstones are TNG and eddie izzard

also i got really annoyed because i bought it without reading the details and when it arrived i realised i'd bought something in bloodaxe. oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear no.

i have no personal history or animus! and i like a great number of young british poets-- i don't think I feel a distaste for them in general? It would be unreasonable for me to expect of myself that I would like all of these young people; it's maybe a little disappointing to me when the ones I like fall so clearly into a type.

on flicking through thus far the only one i've been tempted to stop and actually read is the 'therefore' guy

have spent as much time rolling my eyes at the biographies as i have reading the poetry. probably a bad sign

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/books/john-hollander-poet-known-for-his-range-dies-at-83.html?hp

so i posted abt this on fb but would like to submit the question here also

just picked up michael robbins' widely-praised book alien vs. predator, and i think i *get it*--it's cleverly versified pop culture riffs with some pathos baked in by way of careful use of references--but, like, this shit seems to have blown people's minds? and i'm not sure why? i know it's like uncool to hope for a view into a narrator's inner life or whatever, but as clever as this is, it leaves me pretty cold.

have any of you guys read it? thoughts?

Michael Robbins - Alien Vs. Predator (nb this book of poems is not about aliens, predators or their conflicts)

it got its own-damn-thread, fwiw

i think it's weird reading more than three poems of his at a time, or maybe ever, because of the sorta exposure of formula, technique, types-of-reference-points, &c, but I also think there's something insufficient about only seeing him in this broader context; that stuff is punchy, & wasn't being fed to people like that (afaik &c&x), & it seems to have some sorta formal timeliness that delivered what he wrote quite freshly, which can evaporate under scrutiny/saturation

oh lookat that

currently trying to wrap my brain around bernadette mayer's 'scarlet tanager'

btw i really love brenda hillman's essay on teaching contemporary poetry, which also functions as a guide on how its readers can slip into it more easily/thoughtfully:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/239762

It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes.

lol

what's good

should i just keep reading twitter

I liked Charles Bernstein's book from this year...

markers who do you follow on twitter

http://shoutkey.com/provision

click that

and no it isn't a trick

New Franz Wright, bleak and amazing as ever.

ck williams, my favorite living poet. one of his poems was part of my wedding vows.

and now this

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-a-movie-based-on-a-book-of-poems-tar-stars-james-franco-of-course-20131111,0,2046763.story#axzz2kY6zFryD

a good friend has a new book coming out soon: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/dear-corp

A friend of mine sent me the link to this Kate Kilalea poem and I think it's incredible: http://newpoetries.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/don-share-on-kate-kilaleas-henneckers.html

(the subsequent interpretation stuff i find a little wearying: all this i-i-i- itemising of a person's reaction raises my hackles the way faux-naivety does)

I've been doing a poetry-reading round-robin email with a few friends - i.e. where we record mp3s of ourselves reading poems and send them to each other - and it's having a huge effect on how i think about poetry, way out of proportion to what i would have expected. I don't feel like I get a better sense of the poems from reading them aloud, but rather a bunch of different conflicting and sometimes unhelpful versions -- as dramatic monologue, as collection of sounds, as rhythm game. It makes everything so much harder; it's turning me against things i've liked for a while.

That poem's really exciting. To begin with - e.g. "Wow. The rain. Rose beetles" and "Ickira trecketre stedenthal, said the train" - I was prepared to be irritated, but as it expanded it got more and more wild and interesting.

The interpretation had some useful things to say, but you're spot on with the faux-naivety thing. The whole "I googled this and got nothing, but googling something else gave me a clue" style is very weird unless the point of his site is to be some step-by-step guide to approaching a poem.

my friend's new book is really, really good: http://www.h-ngm-n.com/dear-corp/

Kilalea is good and so is Tara Bergin I think

just read clover's "red epic" and enjoyed it a lot and now i see it is available free: http://communeeditions.com/red-epic-joshua-clover/

I can't find a more suitable thread to post this to, but I just wanted to say it makes me a little sad to see the dismissal of the poet H.D. in some earlier posts. Have people read Trilogy and Hermetic Definition? The earlier poetry generally hasn't done much for me (though many others swear by it), but I think the late poetry, especially those two collections, are where it's at. I remember "Winter Love" in particular as having some strikingly musical passages, though it's been a while since I read it. (I ditched my copy of Hermetic Definition a long time ago because I was annoyed with my youthful underlining and marginalia.) Helen in Egypt is a hard nut to crack and is perplexingly static. I can't say I've ever loved it either.

Her memoir, Tribute to Freud is also quite good (and I've seen it recommended in bibliographies of works on Freud for non-specialists), and the highly edited memoirs New Directions put out at one time, entitled The Gift, has some fascinating material (though I never made it through the unexpurgated version of the memoir material put out much later by some university press or other). End to Torment (on Pound) is also at least a breeze to read. I can't say I've ever enjoyed her fiction.

(I might be partial to the material in the Gift because of the references to Pennsylvania German culture, which makes up a good part of my own background.)

it makes me a little sad to see the dismissal of the poet H.D. in some earlier posts.

I searched around in this thread for these dismissals and couldn't find them. That doesn't mean they aren't there, but can you give me a hint?

Haha, there were maybe 1.5 dimissals, but not on this thread just in the deep archives of ILB.

HD >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Edith Sitwell >> Amy Lowell

I never cared much about those two. I think I've read more Sitwell than Lowell, but it's been a while. I'd rather read Loy than either of those, if we're doing women poets. But I'd rather read HD or Loy than some very well known male modernist poets as well.

yup, with cardamon here. I think of her as epitome of in-the-academy US poetry.

I think language poetry is the ultimate made-for-the-academy poetry, since it needs so much theory to prop it up, but I largely hate it. And I know that many who love it will say: oh no, it's not about the theory.

I did read some Graham a while back and it seemed okay and everything but went by me in a blur. But most poetry does now. I probably shouldn't even be allowed to comment since although I've read a ton of poetry over the years (not much lately), I only like maybe 1% of it at this point.

Robert Duncan said something in an interview somewhere about how in the Elizabethan era, you wrote poetry for the stage, because that's where the money was; and now you write poetry for the classroom, for the same reason. Something like that. He was including himself in the group of poets writing for the classroom, so it wasn't pointing fingers.

Maybe he didn't say money, maybe he said audience.

Does anyone have anything to say about Akashic Press's Black Goat imprint? I've been a little intrigued with it since finding out about it. It looks like it's slowed down though so maybe nobody has been biting.

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog-tag/black-goat/

xps

Being a careful, respectful and understanding reader never requires you to like what you find. These days I find that even the best poetry I read seldom excites me as it did when I was younger, but the best still engages me and gives me worthwhile satisfaction.

If you haven't already perused the many threads where ilxors have posted their own poetry, you really ought to. The results are not overly concerned with theory, reputation-making, or critical approval, and so are rather refreshing. You might like a good 3%!

On the anniversary of the birth of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), poet Marilyn Hacker shares a new translation:

The Second Olive Tree

By Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree
Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow
Covers her one leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.
Standing, she is seated, and seated, standing.
She lives as a friendly sister of eternity, neighbor of time
That helps her stock her luminous oil and
Forget the invaders’ names, except the Romans, who
Coexisted with her, and borrowed some of her branches
To weave wreaths. They did not treat her as a prisoner of war
But as a venerable grandmother, before whose calm dignity
Swords shatter. In her reticent silver-green
Color hesitates to say what it thinks, and to look at what is behind
The portrait, for the olive tree is neither green nor silver.
The olive tree is the color of peace, if peace needed
A color. No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!
But: How noble and how splendid! And she,
She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles
And re-educates them in tenderness and humility: Go home
And light your lamps with my oil! But
These soldiers, these modern soldiers
Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage
Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,
Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky.
She did not weep or cry out. But one of her grandsons
Who witnessed the execution threw a stone
At a soldier, and he was martyred with her.
After the victorious soldiers
Had gone on their way, we buried him there, in that deep
Pit – the grandmother’s cradle. And that is why we were
Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive
Tree – a thorny olive tree – and green!

Derek Walcott

With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings,

midsummer’s leaves race to extinction like the roar

of a Brixton riot tunneled by water hoses;

they seethe towards autumn’s fire—it is in their nature,

5 being men as well as leaves, to die for the sun.

The leaf stems tug at their chains, the branches bending

like Boer cattle under Tory whips that drag every wagon

nearer to apartheid. And, for me, that closes

the child’s fairy tale of an antic England—fairy rings,

10 thatched cottages fenced with dog roses,

a green gale lifting the hair of Warwickshire.

I was there to add some color to the British theater.

“But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare, they have no experience.”

This was true. Their thick skulls bled with rancor

15 when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips

you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,

and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,

while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire

20 that began with Caedmon’s raceless dew, and is ending

in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships

Ha -- was gonna post that I'm rereading The Bounty.

I've been enjoying the Szymborska collection I've been reading. She got good pretty early on (by her early 30s at least) and stayed very good for a long period of time. I feel like that's one award the Nobel committee got right.

^^^

Especially her death poems

Derek Walcott

New Frederick Seidel poem this week:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/03/21/now/

Started reading Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Preistdaddy.

FOGLAND

In winter my lover thrives
among the forest creatures.
The laughing fox knows I must return
before morning.
How the clouds tremble! And a layer
of broken ice falls on me
from the snow craters.

In winter my lover
is a tree among trees inviting
the melancholic crows
to its lovely branches. She knows
that at dusk, the wind will raise
her stiff adorned evening gown
and chase me home.

In winter my lover
swims mute among the fish.
On the bank, I stand in thrall to waters,
caressed from within
by the stroke of her fins.
I watch as she dips and turns,
till banished by the floes.

And warned once more by the shriek
of the bird that arcs stiffly
above, I head for the open field: there
she plucks the hens bald,
throws me a white collarbone.
I wield it to my throat,
make my way through the scattered plumage.

A faithless lover, as well I know,
at times she sweeps into town
in her high-heels,
she parades herself in bars, the straw
from her glass deep in her mouth,
the mot juste tripping from her lips.
I do not understand this language.

I have seen fog-land,
I have eaten the smoke-screened heart.

-- Ingeborg Bachmann

Finished both of Patricia Lockwood’s poetry books & her memoir.

How were they?

That was to ghost of markers above. Anyone found anything else good?

lockwood's poetry doesn't really do much for me but i found her memoir to be pretty good. it's often hilarious (obv.) and touching. i thought the chapter on music was particularly good

her poetry is pretty prose-ey (prosaic but without the negative connotation) tbh

100+ free PDF poetry chapbooks "celebrating" 100+ days of Trump awfulness: http://www.moriapoetry.com/locofo.html

(Haven't read any of them yet, but surely worth a look)

are all the chapbooks about trump

inspired by the america of his first 100 days, but not necessarily about _him_ per se

Some very choice stuff to be had here:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/the-magic-of-limestone-country/

‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’

From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the slightest chance connection. While her neighbours in Coleshill go about their spongy, fossil-filled environment with nary a thought of ‘chthonic forces’, Sampson inhabits a half-soluble landscape of subterranean streams and geopathic stress created by the compacted shells and skeletons of primeval sea-creatures.

A professor of poetry and champion of creative writing as a therapeutic tool, Sampson fortunately finds other people as interesting as herself. This ‘personal exploration’ of the ways in which a mind interacts with a landscape might have been a gallery of psycho-geographical selfies in picturesque settings; which, to some extent, it is. She relives an early love affair with a chain-smoking Macedonian in the ‘intractable, dense and mysterious’ Slovenian Karst and ...

jeez---contemporary enough, still: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

Saddened to find out that Tom Raworth passed away last February.

"Anxiety is just another form of entertainment." NEA Presents: Frank O'Hara reading his poetry,writing some more while talking on the phone and being filmed, also discussing his multimedia collabs, in progrss (shortly before his death). Ed Sanders reads his poetry in his Peace Eye Bookstore (a bunch of other poets on this same page)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89pOmcTVbTY

This happened (and the Guardian editorialised it terribly), what do you lot think

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/poetry-world-split-over-polemic-attacking-amateur-work-by-young-female-poets

Well, it's... not black and white. I think this debate playing out as it is, is something to be welcomed and is right on time. I can go a long way with Watts:

"Watts attacks the “cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’"

'Honesty' and 'accessibility' have never been things that attracted me in poetry. Honesty and accessibility is what I look for in an automobile mechanic, not poetry. One can easily argue both are 'enemies' of poetry. What's good poetry without a secret, without having to overcome at least some obstacle, without running your head into its wall, without dirt or ugliness, to ultimately come to a revelation or enjoyment or?

Also, honesty and accessibility is goddamn tiring. *Everything* is honest and accessible nowadays. It's all available, shared within a second. This was already uninteresting when Seneca wrote poetry, let alone today w/ instagram etc.

So if the quoted “you should see me / when my heart is broken / i don’t grieve / i shatter” is exemplary, yeah, pass the Dutchie the left hand side man, it's not for me.

But... All that doesn't mean it's not poetry, or shouldn't be called poetry, or shouldn't be lauded, shouldn't be praised. It's not that it's not poetry; it is. It's that it's bad poetry is what deserves critique imo. Everyone has the right to write (or love) bad poetry. We've all done it. Every single one of us is guilty of doing that. Loving bad shit.

Tl;dr:

Saying it's not poetry: bad
Saying it's bad poetry: yes

When I was young, 'young adult fiction', as an advertised literary genre did not exist. And thank god for that. As a young adult the last thing I'd do is walk to the 'young adult fiction' section in the book store. "The fuck is this shit?! You are *marketing* stuff from a boring 30-something to be thee best stuff for me? Off to the gulag with you ffs!" You'd want a rebel, a dark, dissonant voice. Rimbaud for one, who was a young adult all of his writing days, but didn't write like one and sure as hell took care he wasn't advertised as such.

But since poetry now can also be some words framed into a teal/orange square instagram picture, I don't see why we shouldn't call that poetry. The value lies in what the readers derive from it. But it can, and should, still be called out for being bad poetry if it is.

Part of me really, really liked seeing a full-on critical takedown of this type of poetry; and part of me watched and disapproved of that liking.

I unashamedly liked the bit in the article where Watts catches Don Paterson changing his critical tune for convenience (he'd previously argued against the things he praises in McNish).

It's interesting getting yr copy of a magazine in the post, reading through it, thinking ah yeah that's a take I've not seen before, and moving on - then watch the same article blow up across social media but framed very differently.

Part of me really, really liked seeing a full-on critical takedown of this type of poetry; and part of me watched and disapproved of that liking.

You could've spared me a couple of minutes had you posted this before me tbh. I feel myself inching towards this stance in a lot of these debates. Not necessarily to or fro a certain position, more like seeing the discourse for what it is in the rearviewmirror and driving off, seeing it shrink and shrink...

Yeah. I mean I've seen a lot of facebook commentary to the effect of, 'shock horror, Watts is being ridiculously harsh on these young poets' - rather as if people are not so much defending Mcnish and Kaur qua poetry, but are rather aghast that Watts would break the politeness code. She does come across as harsh but I can as you say see her side of it and the other.

Now the other side of it (this post got very long, congrats to anyone who reads to end), the thing I thought Watts left unsaid was: yeah so you've got the sort of performance poets who turn up at every open-mic night in the land, and rant, go on for too long, jokes fall flat, tone is off, wouldn't it be better if they read a few more books and did some editing, and tried to write poetry that did something instead of said something for once.

You've got that for sure, and it's not very good; I'm glad Watts has set about criticising that, and the bit of Mcnish that's like that; but you've also got the 'plausible poetry' written by, like, well to stitch a stereotype together, people who did a creative writing course and now run a yearly writer's retreat and are published by Faber.

Certainly some study of poetry, some 'craft', and of course editing, has gone into it, but not very intensively; the imaginative blinkers are still on, it still avoids the risks inherent in trying to write like Rimbaud or trying to write a sonnet or adopting a Yeatsian tone, all of which if you do you have a high chance of failing outright and a slim chance of genuinely opening a new door. Avoid these risks, and you pass. Maybe you wouldn't pass with Watts actually, but in general this is how contemporary poetry goes.

And this plausible poetry is everywhere, well not everywhere, but makes up a large chunk of the poetry currently published in Britain. It's understandable that someone - especially a younger person - would take one look at it and fuck it off entirely in favour of doing some performance poetry at a festival, which I suppose is probably an awesome experience, with tangible rewards - backslaps and cheers from pissed people who don't normally like poetry are going to be more fun than a series of rejection letters.

I guess I think Watts could have cracked the ghost of a smile and shown a bit of understanding of that side of it; an awareness that it's all well and good talking about literary standards but er, what that often translates to in real life is a very very boring poem with an italicised quote from Martin Luther at the beginning, about the author's holiday to somewhere cultural. Or indeed a book about limestone, see upthread.

Yeah, def some poetry is too safe. Some can work almost equally well in performance or on the page. Usually not the deepest poetry, but Blake is an exception, judging for instance by most of Allen Ginsberg's The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, finally all together in the 2017 edition. I don't find Whitman as powerful---he can oversell---but Fred Hersh's shrewd settings of Leaves of Grass for singers does hold my attention, and he's another influence on Ginsberg, some of whose own writing works both ways, projecting or at least selling honesty successfully, and certainly he favors direct address: " Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb, I don't feel good don't bother me." I'll still take that over a lot of Frank O'Hara.

"Deepest" aside, sometimes it works better when the audience has time to stop and think, linger on a word or line, re-read whatever you please. So I'm trying to cut back on NPR.

Joan Murray, re-re-rediscovered, new to me----gonna have to get this collection (I don't agree with every single one of his comments on this first poem, for instance, but as in all the DC pieces I've seen, he presents things with room for other views)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/joan-murrays-enduring-poetry-of-the-senses

local bookstore had more rh sin books than any other poet and ugh: https://www.instagram.com/r.h.sin/

https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/entertainment/2018/10/21/news/carol-ann-duffy-pens-poem-to-mark-centenary-of-armistice-day-1464820/

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.

Thanks to these 'tides' which also 'chant', I am now convinced that war is bad.

Poem seems to be stuck between two ideas: war as a mistake morally significant because it could be avoided, and war as an endless problem, rather like the sea, about which nothing can be done. Really these seem like contrary postures.

The century is a tide, which is chanting the psalms, and also a book, with pages, and it is also wounded. The sort of heavy mixed metaphor that brooks no argument, you have to take it or leave it.

Also the statement 'we learn nothing' is a bit questionable. I for one have been to look at several preserved battleships and even read one or two books about wars. Which is a deliberate misreading of what she means, but still.

If history is 'chastising' these shores, that is Britain specifically, for starting wars, we might ask whether it is also chastising the shores of Germany and Japan, and if not, why not?

The only specific real picture we get is of, presumably, British tommies boarding boats, and that's it, and even then they're singing with the bravery of belief. No names or descriptions, or place names.

At least we now know that God has ended, so we're one up on whatever stupid religious naivete those people might have maintained before and after the war.

I find that the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg does rather more than 'gargle its own blood'.

Unrelated - I thought I'd check in with difficult Cambridge poets, see what Simon Jarvis has been up to for the last couple of years and yikes.

xp History as an ocean makes some some sense.

Writing poetry to mark formal and solemn occasions is a tricky business and most poets of this age have no practice at it and never developed any talent they may have had in that direction. Carol Ann Duffy has caught a bit of the heavy music, but her meanings stumble against her ideas like drunks in the dark.

Incidentally, Hopkins fits the classic paedophile profile but I dislike him because I don't think he's any good.

can one fp a whole blog

Xp that is very bad news re: Jarvis. I dunno how to go about running 'good poetry, bad man' on someone who's done something that bad.

Elsewhere has anyone read penguin New poets series (their new one). Tried to encounter a few in waterstone's last time I was in, but did not like

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/22/is-contemporary-poetry-really-in-a-rotten-state-or-just-a-new-one

Novelist Rose Tremain thinks poetry these days is overrated. “Let’s dare to say it out loud: contemporary poetry is in a rotten state,” she told the TLS this week. “Having binned all the rules, most poets seem to think that rolling out some pastry-coloured prose, adding a sprinkling of white space, then cutting it up into little shapelets will do. I’m fervently hoping for something better soon.”

Had Tremain really managed to miss the whole of modernism? After all, the modernists swore they had “binned all the rules” at or around the end of the 19th century. For anyone, much less a writer, 20th-century modernist poets are hard to miss; whether it is the sediments of Eliot or Pound, or the brilliant treasures of HD, Mina Loy or Hope Mirrlees. Had Tremain leapt over the cross-currents of the next 100 years from Tennyson to Walter de la Mare to Philip Larkin, flat-footing it on their bald, smooth verse to land on some plaintive lyrical bank of our new century?

ts eliot and ezra pound not contemporary poetry

Xp

I'm not sure which is worse: 'they have broken the rules' or 'modernism means you can't ask for poetry based on rules' or 'because of Eliot and Pound, contemporary poetry need not answer to any standard'.

The Outside Scoop

Another xp

I h8 the way those two get brought in to justify free verse; Eliot tends to have trimeter, tetrameter and alexandrines going on; Pound began with strict formal verse, moving on to a new style for the cantons, and praised good examples of it throughout his essays

Sad news about Les Murray.

Read 'Deaf Republic' by Ilya Kaminsky which I liked a lot.

anyone read
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1331/9925/products/witch_draft_cover_grande.png

I read it - I remember it reminded me of Cummings quite often.

https://readingintranslation.com/2019/06/01/its-a-wonderful-death-hilda-hilsts-of-death-minimal-odes-translated-from-portuguese-by-laura-cesarco-eglin/

Just ordered this:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/08/15/michael-hofmann-cold-comforts/

Sounds like he’s a big Robert Lowell fan, which is a good sign.

Was thinking it might be too late for summer reading, but the humidity is ba-a-a-ck (ghost of Dorian), so it's currently hotter than God's stuffed balls where I live, so I'll go ahead and post this:

Far Rockaway

"the cure of souls." Henry James

The radiant soda of the seashore fashions
Fun, foam, and freedom. The sea laves
The shaven sand. And the light sways forward
On the self-destroying waves.

The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes
With business suits and the traffic's motion;
The lolling man lies with the passionate sun,
He returns to the children digging at summer,
A melon-like fruit.

O glittering and rocking and bursting and blue
--Eternities of sea and sky shadow no pleasure:
Time unheard moves and the heart of man is eaten
Consummately at leisure.

The novelist tangential on the boardwalk overhead
Seeks his cure of souls in his own anxious gaze.
"Here," he says, "With whom?" he asks, "This?" he questions,
"What tedium, what blaze?"

"What satisfaction, fruit? What transit, heaven?
Criminal, justified? Arrived at what June?"
That nervous conscience amidst the concessions
is a haunting, haunted moon.

---Delmore Schwartz

Hofmann has a very funny poem about Donald Trump in the current issue of the NY Review of Books.

https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/new-hunger/?fbclid=IwAR1WLfTPNtRvqic2LDffBiSXZAJ5VPcWTj3IB0HdgQGWwVdIe8BWljGQ8ps

Name sound familiar?

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Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 497
11 HOURS AGO

Big news announced this week, the upcoming (April 2021) CD release by Omnivore Recordings of Howl at Reed College (from February, 1956, the first recorded reading).
Variety in its announcement notes the background:

“The tape went forgotten until 2007, when author John Suiter found it in a box at Reed’s Hauser Memorial Library while doing research on another poet who read at the college that day, Gary Snyder. Its discovery made the news after being verified the following year. But it was to still go unheard to the general public until a Hollywood-Oregon connection made its release inevitable.

Reed named Dr. Audrey Bilger its president in 2019. Bilger happens to be married to Cheryl Pawelski, the Grammy-winning co-founder of Omnivore Recordings, who had moved to Oregon herself upon Bilger’s appointment. Omnivore already had history with Ginsberg, having released The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience in 2017 and The Last Word on First Blues in 2016. Using her existing connections with the Ginsberg estate, Pawelski sent the tape to Grammy Award-winning engineer Michael Graves to have it transferred, restored and mastered.”

Chris Lydgate in Reed Magazine tells more:

Its first public reading took place at San Francisco’s famous Six Gallery in October, 1955. Along with Ginsberg, the evening included readings by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poet Kenneth Rexroth was the emcee; Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady were in the audience. Unfortunately, no one thought to record this historic moment. Ginsberg was recorded reading the poem at Berkeley a few months later in March, 1956, and for many years literary historians thought that recording was the first. But they were wrong. Earlier in 1956, Ginsberg and Snyder went hitchhiking through the Pacific Northwest, and arrived at Reed, where they decided to hold a poetry reading in the common room of the Anna Mann dormitory. On February 14, Ginsberg read the first section of “Howl,” still very much a work in progress. And this time, someone brought a tape recorder.”

John Suiter, also in Reed Magazine, back in 2008, provides the essential account:

“Before launching into “Howl” itself, Ginsberg pauses to briefly prime his listeners for what’s to come. “The line length,” he says. “You’ll notice that they’re all built on bop—You might think of them as built on a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ ’til everyone in the hall was out of his head—and Young was also . . .” (This was pure Kerouac, straight from the prefatory note to Mexico City Blues, wherein Kerouac states his notion of the poet as jazz saxophonist, “blowing” his poetic ideas in breath lines “from chorus to chorus.”)
(He) then begins with his now-famous opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”—delivered in a rather flat affect. First-time listeners may be surprised at how low-key Ginsberg sounds at the outset of this reading of “Howl,” though this was typical, and soon enough his voice rises to what he later called “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.”
“I still hadn’t broken out of the classical Dylan Thomas monotone,” Ginsberg later wrote of his early readings. “—the divine machine revs up over and over until it takes off.”
The Reed recording of February 1956 is superb, faithful in pitch and superior in sound quality to any presently known 1950s version. Allen is miked closely, so his volume is even throughout. His enunciation is clear, his timing perfect; he never stumbles. His accent is classic North Jersey Jewish, intelligent and passionate. The poet-as-saxman metaphor comes demonstrably true as we hear Ginsberg drawing in great breaths at the anaphoric head of every line. It’s a recording to be breathed with as much as listened to…..”

links: https://allenginsberg.org/2021/01/f-j-15-2/

Roll on Omnivore---from my Uproxx ballot comments re: 2019:
Allen Ginsberg: The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience (Omnivore)

Baaahing at and from what no more can be seen from the darkening green, then venturing through rounds in the smokey city, letting the good and bad times constantly roll back and forth through each other, Blake and Ginsberg's magisterial and magical realness trespass is sometimes given pause and detour by evidence of a woman in there somewhere, as the wordmazes make way, even more---something to do with Ginsberg's choice of poems to include: no valentines, but some things that shake the darkness deeper, where Beatrice is unseen, also unsought, it seems. Eventually he meets Arthur Russell, who joins Bob Dylan etc. for nocturnes but hold on now when they meet, it's in a San Francisco park including a Buddhist troupe that AR is living with: here they keep rolling up and down though a thunderclap of drone.

Oops, that was originally from 2017, pasted into 2019 comments re Arthur Release.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Michael Robbins' new collection:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/156119/it-just-sort-of-happened

Alien vs Predator was a fun collection, but I like the excerpts of the longer poems that hint at a different direction here.

Lineated prose isn't poetry, as much as Robbins and many others want it to be.

michael robbins sucks

his work just feels empty to me despite/because of how dense with reference it is. and when he employs rhyming like a guy who read john berryman once i want to saw my own head off

I like referential work but there's nothing sly or ambiguous about Robbins' work, which makes it really uninteresting to read.

But then again, I am an enormous hater of most popular contemporary poetry, so whatever.

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

I guess the title poem is free to read online, already five years old at this point, though I never read it, despite being at least a lukewarm Robbins fan:

https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6808/walkman-michael-robbins

It definitely is lineated prose, not sure it can't also be poetry though.

pretty much just reads like an essay to me

an essay i would abandon reading

Maybe the prosaic style is supposed to be a gesture of Marxist solidarity with populist Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur.

there’s a great part in lydia davis essays book where she talks about how non-lineated prose can be poetry and some lineated poetry is in fact prose and she says it’s highly subjective but then tries to explain it then gives a couples examples and it’s super spot on.

lol i totally remember that one

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, June 21, 2021 2:51 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have been trying to hold my tongue about him online for YEARS but I went to grad school with him and he was an asshole then for sure. I do not admire his poetry, but I can definitely not be objective.

There are plenty of contemporary poets who write about pop music, sometimes in a very prosaic manner, who are much better than Robbins. Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, Simone White, Moten. These poets are pushing boundaries of what content and form can do in terms of a poem's affective power...Robbins often reads like he's writing a somewhat pedestrian memoir...there's no surprise, no joy, and nothing interesting about his lines.

Like it shocks me that someone would give a fuck about Robbins if they could read Simone White's work about Future.

I thought Dan Chiasson made some astute comments about Joni Mitchell in The New Yorker, not always close to the way I hear her, but worth thinking about, unlike the presentations by many official music writers. Every other time I've seen him in there, he's written about about poetry, and has led me to good stuff.

Tough crowd. I liked the Robbins book. But admittedly I am in no way up to date as far as contemporary poetry goes.

I'm planning to get the book at some point.

Tbf, if it's published by a major publishing house, most poets are going to hate it. Robbins isn't for me, and that's fine.

(it's still bad poetry)

its p boring but i can't think its *bad poetry* and i'm not sure i get the lineated prose thing, seems less so than lots of stuff that has been called poetry for at least 50 years. the line breaks make sense to me as a metering device more than they often do in poems that i think are better or funnier or more insightful or feel stranger or

I would be interested if you could expand a bit on what you mean tbh table, i'm particularly surprised bc I'm sure I've seen you post positively about people like susan howe who i'm a big fan of and whose work is very agnostic about boundaries between poetry/prose/painting etc. I guess I'm just a bit confused because I don't suspect that you are operating from a conservative position, yet i can't see how otherwise to read this 'not-poetry' calling of poetry that is itself fairly conservative. I'm trying to imagine any analogue of this where I could go along with something being called 'not cinema' or 'not music'

ftr my interest in poetry tends to be that i'm a total philistine but I like to read things that are 'experimental' or kindof high modernist (I guess mostly in a surrealist tradition). I would make no claim that I understand even half of the stuff I read so that I often find discussions of even totally canonical things I like, like New York School, absolutely impenetrable (I read a book about ashbery once that made me doubt anything I thought I had understood about it at all!).

Anyway its not contemporary but one of the books I've had beside my bed for some time is 'experts are puzzled' by laura riding, which I think could very easily be described as 'lineated prose'; its full of these truncated little essays in plain text without line breaks, and you could argue quite easily that its not poetry at all and I'm not even sure what riding's view was on that. Yet there seems to be something about how it evades how an essay is supposed to function, and tugs at the idea of language and argument from inside, that seems to me to be poetry. I'm not sure I need or want to have a working definition of what poetry is or isn't that I can use as a criterion, but one sense I have of what it can do is that its something that plays with language to get it to do something new or interesting, or at least make me think about the relationship between ideas and the words that express them.

Anyway my understanding from that is that anything that gets designated as poetry kindof has to be taken seriously as poetry. It doesn’t mean that its interesting or makes you feel anything or make you think anything new or interesting about language, (although it might for somebody else!) . Even then, reading something like this michael robbins guy, it wasn’t interesting at first, but then it made me think about other poets whose work I like that it shares features with (refusing a ‘poetic’ language and using ordinary language, taking a shape that doesnt quite fit an essay or a story and so kind of inconclusive), and maybe it would make me think in future more precisely about those other poets work work or how poetry to other kinds of writing (about music, or food, or history, or writing) relate. It might be cheap or lazy but just to take a piece of writing that asserts itself as poetry as poetry is always to invite some way of thinking about it that is different from how I might otherwise think about it.

Your take on the Riding book is v. appealing, will check thx

Good discussion.

He's dead but I'm rereading Thom Gunn with great pleasure.

plax, my opinion doesn't arrive from a conservative view, I don't think.

When I read Bernadette Mayer, for instance, or someone more actively "contemporary" like Lewis Freedman, I can tell that while the poems are often composed of long, sentence-like syntactic units, that they are *meant* to be that way; that is, they were written qua poems utilizing the form of the sentence.

In Robbins' work, I'm not so sure— the line breaks seem either disinterested or obvious or both. They read, in other words, as if Robbins wrote them as sentences, then lineated them later. I guess I should admit, then, that my bit about them "not being poetry" was hyperbolic, but what I meant is that I find poetry like this to be incredibly boring— but at least Robbins isn't as boring as this absolute shithead of a human being, whose work is *about* ideology rather than arriving from it, and whose entire first book is just bland rad-left truisms like this crap.

https://t.co/Qj8BW4UOD1 pic.twitter.com/ST18bLJKFr

— Patrick (@prosepoems) June 4, 2021

He lives in Philadelphia, and honestly, I will punch him if I ever meet him.

That's a poem?

Supposedly.

One of the strains in US contemporary poetry is what might accurately be called "socialist realism," in which a usually white person writes poems that are more about showing their personal commitment to class struggle and the cause of socialism. If you don't like the poem, then that means you are an elitist snob. Trust me when I write that these people have no sense of nuance, grace, or social skill.

I think we may be overlooking the fact that poetry that is difficult to parse or understand is generally not popular, and the most popular poetry is generally pretty easy to read and understand because it follows rules of sentence formation and logic that are commonly assumed in prose.

Rupi Kaur, for instance. No socialist message, just short affirmative poems that generally read like prose-like fragments.

we're talking about poetry, tho, not schlocky self-help shit that could be on a hallmark card

That poem quoted above is way way worse than Michael Robbins, to the point that I find it really weird to bring it up in the context of Robbins's line breaks, and is from a book titled "Profit/Prophet" no less

One of the strains in US contemporary poetry is what might accurately be called "socialist realism,"

I'm sure this is right but at the same time the poet quoted above says "Some of Patrick's writing can be found in Peace, Land, and Bread, SORTES, Recenter Press Poetry Journal, Mad House Magazine, Apiary, & Bedfellows" so he's not exactly representative of what kind of work is being rewarded by the mainstream US contemporary poetry universe

Perhaps you don't understand how poetry actually operates in the world, then— almost any poetry book that sells over 250 copies is a high-selling book in contemporary US poetry. Even people whose books get published by major publishing houses don't sell much more than that. The actual "mainstream US contemporary poetry universe" consists of maybe 10 people, and many of them are (rightly) given little heed or respect. For example, no one I know gives a *shit* about Michael Robbins— he's considered an absolute joke among poets, some of whom are quite well-regarded.

This isn't meant to be a "oh whoa is me, why doesn't anyone love poetry," by the way— I'm fine with the crumbs thrown to me by the establishment, and that my last book went into a second printing. It's just that there needs to be a big adjustment as to what is considered "mainstream" in this conversation, seeing as how books that haven't sold more than 100 copies win the National Book Award for poetry *all the time.*

And given that Blagrave's poem has been shared and retweeted hundreds of times, and his magazine Prolit has been featured in a major daily newspaper, his reach is one that might be considered "large" for the poetry world.

Yeah I don't understand how poetry actually operates in the world so this is really interesting to me! I would have thought the "mainstream contemporary poetry universe" was people who were published in, like, the New Yorker or Poetry (I know those are different people or can be) and whose books came out with FSG or Graywolf (also different I know) and who, like, won the National Book Award. But looking at this longlist

https://www.nationalbook.org/2020-national-book-awards-longlist-for-poetry/

I can see that indeed close to half of the books are from presses I've NEVER heard of. (The ones I know are Wesleyan, Copper Canyon, New Directions, Graywolf to give some sense of what I'm talking about.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really know what I think the poetry universe IS. I thought a lot of it was, like, the people who have jobs teaching creative writing in colleges and publishing in Tin House or whatever. Except I see that Tin House has stopped publishing which goes to show you how up to date I am.

lol that socialist realist poet reads to me as a kind of barbed irony (as in sincere but also self effacingly bald-faced)

Yeah, eephus!, it's a weird world that doesn't make a lot of sense any longer— with many writing programs relying on contingent labor, and a subcultural yet tiered market that in some ways mimics the larger literary marketplace, there's a ton of variation in terms of what gets lauded, what is accessible, and so on. For example, I have friends who have won some big awards, or been long-listed for some big awards, but none of them have books on major presses, and none of them are in academia. By the same token, I have friends who have been academics for 20+ years, but whose books never win awards and don't sell very well.

Sorry if any of my previous messages came off as dick-ish, btw! I find this conversation really interesting.

There's also the case of someone like Liz Waldner, who won numerous awards and was considered one of the brightest poets of her generation, but who could not get hired for a full-time academic gig, so kept bouncing around visiting jobs until her health took a turn...and then, she had to run a fundraiser to keep herself alive. This is one of the finest poets of her generation!

On the contrary, I think I was the one being somewhat dickish, you said "one of the strains" and I think I just hadn't grasped how multidimensional and fragmented "success" was in poetry now so I made a snarky post based on the assumption that "has never published in a magazine I've ever heard of" meant "this is a poetry nobody." (pobody?)

Haha, well yeah, I just wanted to make sure that my giving of additional context wasn't read as me being some know-it-all shithead.

Some of the most well-regarded poets aren't widely know until they're old or dead. Just the way it goes!

i think in ireland eg the situation is somewhat different, bc of the relative size of the country and also because of how literature is seen as less elitist in general i think because of the relationship between literature and 20th c historical events etc.

that is to say 'contemporary poetry' is far from hegemonic and national and local contexts will have very different metrics of success and opportunities for support.

i'm always shocked (shocked!) at what privileged backgrounds people you meet in art/literary worlds are in the UK and while I know that this is pretty much the historical norm, it feels far more accessible and diverse in ireland but also far more knitted into people's ordinary lives so I think there's something to be said not only about success etc, but also a diversity of contexts that we care about and the kinds of non-professionalised practices/platforms that we recognise.

certainly it was totally normal for people of my grandparents generation to be able to recite poetry, often people with little literacy skills.

And i remember attending a wedding where a friend was getting married to an australian guy and his family was pretty baffled at how all the irish people kept insisting on making speeches and incorporating long passages of poetry (often written by non-professional poet friends!). I'm not saying this happens at every irish wedding but its not incredibly unusual either. the speeches thing is pretty universal though!

Oh absolutely, and I only really talk about the US because my knowledge of non-US poetry and literary communities isn't large...I know a good deal about Vancouver and Montreal, but that's still so-called North America. The only poets I know personally in the UK are white dudes, for example, which is clearly not representative...

i would say the 'hottest young thing' is ak blakmore whose work, to me, is simply "i went to oxbridge and then i got a septum piercing" but thats probably more uncharitable than it needs to be

my sex

enter breakfast truck, the bluebottles
performing obsequies to marbled bacon

enter girl with manacles. enter
so damn adorable. he likes small fuckdoll.

girl who looks plaintively at porcelain
salt and pepper shakers shaped
like kittens sleeping, intertwined. enter
desolation beside a pinstripe spider-plant enter
knowing how to dress your pear-shape history
history, and after you follow, with a bucket
and a mop – or words to that effect.

enter girl who applies the cooling gel.
enter the Tate Modern to see Yayoi Kusama’s
I Am Here But Nothing which please you
cannot photograph like when
i found out there was a fetish for everything sexuality
seemed like a great leveller. enter nothing
too weird to enter, biking, amused savage
tender repetitions of toilet cubicle graffiti.

enter Fathers in the Clouds (’99)
enter my sex like act not gender and other songs
that make me cry my sex sometimes ballet shoes
both the stones in the pockets of my coat
and the welcoming cold river.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n11/a.k.-blakemore/two-poems

i guess

lmao that is rank

replace that with the lyrics to 'my sex' by ultravox for infinite improvement

Yeah that isn't quite good. Most of what I know is from SPAM and Face Press and Critical Documents...so perhaps similarly situated in the Oxbridge nexus, but more students of Prynne and that kind of thing..."difficult" poetry lol

i was loosely in with the Prynne crowd at the tail-end of university...there was some good stuff but it often came off as way too obscurantist and aloof for its own good

replace that with the lyrics to 'my sex' by ultravox for infinite improvement

― imago,

my first thought when I saw the title

Imago, I admit that I am a huge fan of Prynne's work, but for the most part, I don't find his students' work as compelling.

i feel almost bad about posting that blakemore one. i feel like the first thing i ever read by her was really good and i've never been able to remember where it was but yes that particular one is like the lyrics to a bongwater song except too full of itself and not as funny

also i can't say i've ready anything by prynne is there anything you would recommend? i read a thing about him online just now that says he is influenced by olson holderlin celan and o'hara which is quite a mix and very intriguing

Plax, his collecteds (there are three editions, with timely additions in each) are worth looking for, but the one that gets most people into him is 'The White Stones,' which was reissued by NYRB a few years ago. The book is an outlier, in some ways, as the density and hermetic wordplay of his later work is not as foregrounded, but it's a lovely book, with some absolutely devastating poems in it.

lol all of white stones is on genius.com for some reason!

Ha, brilliant

I bought an actual physical copy of "Walkman" last week, at a bookstore in Cincinnati. I like it.

😬 https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/jia-tolentino/

I have been enjoying the twitter reaction to that incredibly bad poem today.

I agree with the magazine's slogan: whatever that is, I'm against it.

.

jesus

, conditionally,

lol i was wondering if that would get posted here