Your favorite poet/s?

It would be more accurate to say that each of these poets has very clear talents and abilities that I highly appreciate, but that I do not always value on a rigid scale. I often find myself sitting in a chair near ny bookshelf, gazing at the spines in a dreamy sort of way, sampling the titles and authors in my memory or imagination.

After gazing a while I select a book and take it down an open it. I leaf through it, sometimes in search of a particular poem, more often in a spirit of discovery - reading at random. And for that short space the poet I am reading is my favorite, in that he or she fits my immediate desires.

For example, Chaucer is great for the geniality of his tone, intermixed with the familiar-tinged exoticism that comes through his archaic language. Skelton is almost as exotic, but his personality is far more satiric and sharp. Chaucer's satire is gentle, inclusive and sidelong, while Skelton stands fully erect and calls his enemy a knave and a fool. Both are fun, but they don't mix.

Tu Fu was a poet of exceptional reserve and wistfulness. Even when writing a poem to a friend he is sad and apart, but shares his sadness and apartness with exquisite frankness. Li Po is by turns sad, merry, apart and all-embracing, a drunken fountain that plays, ebbs and flows.

I love Donne for his qualities of mind that you will not find in any other poet of any other age. He plays meticulously with ideas, but such ideas as never entered anyone's head before or since. Herbert plays, with equal amounts of style as Donne, but with a dry austerity.

Whitman requires a special mood in me. I must be willing to lollop along, tongue hanging, and listen to the man exapatiate on the spaciousness of his soul through a mere fifty variations of his grand and spacious theme. But when I catch his note of pure sincerity and let it prick my heart, I am lost to him and lollop like any dog at his master's heel.

Pound is sour-minded and schoolmasterish, but ye gods and little fishes, his ear for the language and its turnings is so marvelous, his ability to veer his tone in two lines and take you swiftly in new directions like a poetic carnival ride, he can be exhilirating in ways I can't quite explain.

Guillaume IX, one of the first Provencal poets, didn't leave much to know him by, but that little is captivating.

John Berryman's sonnet sequence is probably the finest written in the past 100 years (I'll get an argument over this, so I'll just say that in my opinion it is so).

Milton's lines are like a very, very slow rain that progressively sink deeper and deeper toward the root of the matter. You have to read a lot of him before you get the full benefit.

I could go on and on. There are fabulous poems and poets out there. Comparison is odious, as Shakespeare said. (BTW, Shakespeare is pretty great shakes as a poet, too - amazingly concrete images, made to spin and shake and nod like living flowers - apt metaphors that come gushing out faster than a cataract.)

But one favorite? Impossible.

Yeah, I realize the questions I raised are limiting, and rather reductive. It wasn't my intent to come off so matter-of-fact on the matter, because I certainly don't read poetry that way, nor do I have such a stifled view of the form. I find it to be a very exhilirating artform (for various reasons) and love it as such.

FWIW, I only asked those questions because reading poetry, for me, is a very slow process. And if you give me 150 different names, I don't really know what to look into (nor will I be able to read all of them, unless you give me about 3 or 4 years). Maybe I should have asked, in your case, what poet are you feeling at the moment and wholeheartedly recommend as of this instant? I'm only looking for some good stuff to check out.

You can stratch out that second sentence of my initial post (because it's rather redundant to ask a bunch of eclectics about the "range" of their tastes, when in fact, I should have known it would so wide to begin with!).

Meant no harm. Really I didn't.

I'm a poetry newb compared to most, especially to you maestros here, and I feel I can learn a lot from this forum.

So, tell me anything you feel is pertinent to the subject of poetry. Recommendations, of course, but also how to read it, how to approach epic poetry, etc. Anything that you think I should know or be aware of while being immersed nella poesia.

I think this is closer to what I'm getting at, more my true intent for starting this tread. I now leave it open to others to comment.

I can unhesitatingly recommend a lot of poets you might not like, depending on your temperment, previous exposure to poetry and what gives you pleasure. An anthology is a great place to browse around and get a feel for who and what is out there.

Do not pay the slightest attention to reputation. Just read around like a slut and sample the wares. These days no one is going to be impressed by your command of the 50 Greatest Poets (whoever they might be) - so why not tickle your own fancy? It's kind of like learning wine, but a whole lot less expensive. You just keep opening books and sampling until you start to know your own tastes. Don't fall for what you're supposed to like.

If it's a snort of MD20-20 (for example Charles Bukowski) that floats your boat, that's dandy, too. Tastes change. You have to start somewhere.

My only other advice is to avoid anthologies, since most don't give you enough context to learn how to read a poet. Collecteds are fine but don't feel you need to read more than a few poems in them, unless you want to. (Those two sentences might seem a bit contradictory but they're not, really!)

And talk with people about what you read (on ILB, perhaps), if you want, especially if you feel strongly about it one way or another (mostly another).

Donne was a raging sensualist and cold intellectual in almost perfect equipoise in his early decades. When his passion turned to religion, the equation tilted further in favor of the intellect, making his later poetry less thrilling, but still quite rewarding.

Therein lies my problem. I know few people who like poetry, and if they do, the poets are all obvious choices (I really dislike how this university tries to distill a command of poetry into a select few poets -- granted they can't teach everybody, and some genuinely warrant the attention, but it's disturbing to see the same names pop up all the time).

That's why I'm happy I found this place. There's much more variety here.

I'm considering doing a poet of the week thread (same general idea as GS's random ten film threads). That might be interesting.

(Those two sentences might seem a bit contradictory but they're not, really!)

I don't think that's contradictory at all! I think I get what you mean. I'm sorta indifferent to anthologies (at least the Norton ones I've read). I don't like their habit of collecting the final(often radically different) versions of all the poems and prose works of a writer. At least with collecteds, you get a sense of their development over time, and you're completely immersed in their worlds/styles.

Anyway, I do appreciate what's been said so far. I really wonder why I even take English classes here, when it's so bloody obvious I learn multitudes more about it on my own time.

Anyway I always welcome poetry threads on ILB. It allows me to be the board curmudgeon, always a cherished role.

I don't quite agree: I think you can waste a lot of time trying to figure out if you like, say, Hardy or Frost or Stevens, if you just read them randomly. But if you check out their greatest hits in the Norton, you'll have a better idea as to whether you should investigate them further. For beginners, surely, that's more efficient?

If you really don't have any foundation in reading poetry then they might be alright, although frankly I'd still rather give someone a book of Bishop or Whitman or Dickinson or Mayer or Berrigan or whoever and let them enter that way.

"When i am dead think only this of me
that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England".

Towards the end of his involvement in WW1 however (He died before it ended, infection from a mosquito bite i believe)his poetry reflects his loss of innocence and naiveity as seen in 'The Dead', especially in the lines

"These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

There is a real sadness, a definite loss of illusionment to be felt in this particular poem. Not all of Rupert Brookes poetry was about the war however, it is just that his wonderful, lyrical way with words is best displayed in his later poems.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

Since no one's doing that, I doubt that Asberger's would be the reason why Marcus is overlooked. A more probable reason is that he never acquired any kind of contemporary reputation to build on or to reconsider. It is always hard to start from zero when you are alive. When you are dead, it's even harder.

The ones I read the most are: Walt Whitman, John Ashbery, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, Arthur Rimbaud, and Wallace Stevens.

B) What poems, in particular? Or is it just a general admiration?

There are specific poems I particularly admire, though I couldn't easily list them all. Some suggestions: "Song of Myself" (Whitman), Where Shall I Wander? (Ashbery), Veinte Poemas de Amour (Neruda), "Maximus, To Himself" or "The Twist" (Olson), "A Season in Hell" (Rimbaud), "The Blue Guitar" (Stevens).

C) If they require translations into English, which ones should be sought out and which ones shouldn't?

Of the poets I listed, the only ones that require translation into English are Rimbaud and Neruda. I haven't read enough different translations to recommend a favorite.

Aimless--Marcus's lack of popularity can IN FACT be directly explained by his autism, as Hugh Kenner explained in an essay in the Partisan Review. The contemporary poetry's emphasis on philosophy of language holds that language is symmetrical with cognition (cf Wittgenstein's limits of language being the limits of his world). This is a very self-aggrandizing view for poets to take and Marcus--like Temple Grandin--often held that language had little to do with cognition and that it is in fact possible to think without words, as toads and unicorns do. Because this is an inconvenient ideology, comparable to Eliot's fascism and Baraka's anti-semitism, the LANGUAGE poetry cabal has more or less excommunicated Marcus from the canon.

...randomly formed words [put] together nonstop for 15 hours a day over 60 years...

My first question would be: if this monstrous ouput was ever culled, who culled it and how? If the poet himself was unable to determine what was comprehensible to others, then I would suspect there's an editor lurking somewhere, whose judgement played a particularly critical role - tatamount to co-authorship. Just a suspicion.

Also, it has often happened that the then-current theory of poetics has excluded a contemporary poet from gaining exposure or approval, but a change in the next generation will rescue the poet's work and acclaim it to the skies. If Kenner is championing Marcus, then I would scarcely say he is being buried, but rather resurrected. Fashions do come and go. Cabals die off. In the end it is the poems that count most.

Also, having done some work with writing computer programs for generating language, I would greatly doubt that true randomness could result in effective poetry, however long it was allowed to run. Marcus must have had some sense of words and meaning, however peculiar it may have been.

I am especially interested in the question of editorial intervention, asked above. If Marcus was actually a random word generator, then he can't claim much credit for it.

Getting back to the topic: Christian Bök is going to be here very soon and I am so ridiculously excited to meet him and spend time with him. Whoo!

I am hyped about checking out people on this thread.

Guillaume Apollinaire, John Berryman, Paul Celan, and the Yasusada author.

B) What poems, in particular? Or is it just a general admiration?

"Zone" is my favorite poem by Apollinaire.

C) If they require translations into English, which ones should be sought out and which ones shouldn't?

Roger Shattuck is the translator of the New Directions "Selected Writings" of Apollinaire, which I think is good, but it is worth finding Samuel Beckett's translation of "Zone", which leads off the excellent "The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry", out of print but still widely available. I do not like the newish book of Paul Celan, translated by John Felsteiner. I suggest instead the translations of Michael Hamburger.