i dig her but sometimes i feel like i'm too slow for her. or i should take a class on her. elizabeth bishop is more my speed.
It took years for Moore to get under my skin - she's a really odd mix of clarity and obscurity, really dense observation with intense visual sense, but then will slip off into abstraction or the moral. It feels like she's this very serious, precise artist, and a really commanding poet of syntax, who just doesn't think or see like anyone else in the century. I used to find her wobbling between trivial and impossible tho.
But yeah Bishop is not far behind Moore and Stevens for me - destroys the rest of the (genuinely formidable) mid-century crowd
Larkin is an A1 shit, but v much my kind of poet.
― woof, Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:40 (fourteen years ago) link
I can't read Frost's "Desert Places" without literally getting a chill:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fastIn a field I looked into going past,And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs.All animals are smothered in their lairs.I am too absent-spirited to count;The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that lonelinessWill be more lonely ere it will be less -A blanker whiteness of benighted snowWIth no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars - on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:40 (fourteen years ago) link
My mid to late twentieth century homies:
MerrillBishopAshberyHechtClampitt
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:41 (fourteen years ago) link
muldoon-related xpost: it's in '7, Middagh Street'
'two girls, I thought: two girls in silk kimonos. / Both beautiful, one a gazebo.'
but with a change of speaker between the first line and the second. i did not realise the quote. which is pretty relevant, the quote, there being some role-of-poetry-and-specifically-Irish-poetry-in-world-affairs stuff going on, in the poem.
― thomp, Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:46 (fourteen years ago) link
BerrymanPlathJarrellJusticeDubie
are mine - Dubie may or may not count for jack in the future, and frankly, anybody who shuns meter isn't likely to get read repeatedly by me however much I enjoy his/her stuff on first pass, but his images have been killin me dead for years.
― in which we apologize for sobering up (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:50 (fourteen years ago) link
I love Justice too. Jarrell's influence as a critic on me is immense (his one novel is a masterful compendium of one-liners) but his poetry leaves me cold. Where should I restart?
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:52 (fourteen years ago) link
Here is Helen Vendler on Jarrell's poetry.
Jarrell ... can be said to have put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry...His first steady original poems date from his experience in the Air Force, when the pity that was his tutelary emotion ... found a universal scope...The secret of his war poems is that in the soldiers he found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother? The luckier baby who has a mother, as Jarrell tells us in "Bats," "clings to her long fur / by his thumbs and toes and teeth... / Her baby hangs on underneath... / All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, / She folds her wings around her sleeping child." So much for Jarrell's dream of maternity...Jarrell often has been taken to task for his sentimentality, but the fiction, recurrent in his work, of a wholly nonsexual tenderness, though it can be unnerving in some of the marriage poems, is indispensable in his long, tearfully elated recollections of childhood. The child who was never mothered enough, the mother who wants to keep her children forever, these are the inhabitants of the lost world, where the perfect filial symbiosis continues forever...For all his wish to be a writer of dramatic monologues, Jarrell could only speak in his own alternately frightened and consolatory voice, as he alternately played child and mother...
His first steady original poems date from his experience in the Air Force, when the pity that was his tutelary emotion ... found a universal scope...
The secret of his war poems is that in the soldiers he found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother? The luckier baby who has a mother, as Jarrell tells us in "Bats," "clings to her long fur / by his thumbs and toes and teeth... / Her baby hangs on underneath... / All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, / She folds her wings around her sleeping child." So much for Jarrell's dream of maternity...
Jarrell often has been taken to task for his sentimentality, but the fiction, recurrent in his work, of a wholly nonsexual tenderness, though it can be unnerving in some of the marriage poems, is indispensable in his long, tearfully elated recollections of childhood. The child who was never mothered enough, the mother who wants to keep her children forever, these are the inhabitants of the lost world, where the perfect filial symbiosis continues forever...
For all his wish to be a writer of dramatic monologues, Jarrell could only speak in his own alternately frightened and consolatory voice, as he alternately played child and mother...
That pretty much nails it for all the poems of his that I've read or listened to. So maybe the answer is you don't, because he's just like that.
― alimosina, Sunday, 30 May 2010 02:39 (fourteen years ago) link
Vendler's terrific. My favorite collection:
http://www.amazon.com/Music-What-Happens-Poems-Critics/dp/0674591534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275187962&sr=1-1
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 30 May 2010 02:53 (fourteen years ago) link
Jarrell poem whose conclusion gives me the shivers every time, still:
90 North
At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sidesI sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.
There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.
—Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silenceOf the unbroken ice. I stand here,The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stareAt the North Pole . . . And now what? Why, go back.
Turn as I please, my step is to the south.The world—my world spins on this final pointOf cold and wretchedness: all lines, all windsEnd in this whirlpool I at last discover.
And it is meaningless. In the child's bedAfter the night's voyage, in that warm worldWhere people work and suffer for the endThat crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
I reached my North and it had meaning.Here at the actual pole of my existence,Where all that I have done is meaningless,Where I die or live by accident alone—
Where, living or dying, I am still alone;Here where North, the night, the berg of deathCrowd me out of the ignorant darkness,I see at last that all the knowledge
I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:22 (fourteen years ago) link
Unfortunately I haven't read enough twentieth century poetry to form my own opinions. I've rad a good amount of Yeats, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric.
My English teacher, whom I trusted, once told me that the two greatest poets of the 20c were Jack Spicer and Basil Bunting.
― henri grenouille (Frogman Henry), Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:30 (fourteen years ago) link
Was your English teacher named Hieronymous J. Pisstake, by any chance?
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:32 (fourteen years ago) link
Oh why, you not a fan of their work?
― henri grenouille (Frogman Henry), Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:38 (fourteen years ago) link
no I'm just being funny 'cause they're good but there are some pretty heavy hitters in contention for the Greatest of 20th C. spot and while I guess I'm open to the idea that either of them, studied closely, are in the company of for example Yeats & Frost....well, no, I'm kind of not. So it seems like poetic challops along the lines of "sure, Shakespeare was good, but he wasn't half the poet Thomas Wyatt was" -- I mean I love Wyatt, a lot, but c'mon
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 03:47 (fourteen years ago) link
Being ignorant of Frost (as most Brits are) I just read a couple of his poems, 'After Apple-Picking' and 'Birches', and while they had a great conversational quality I can't imagine the author of these being the greatest poet of any century, especially not such a dramatic, revolutionary, scary and exciting one as the 20c. yeats certainly engages with a good deal of that in his later work, the earlier stuff is, for me, very hard to enjoy Celtic Twilight guff.I did my dissertation on Yeats, but I find even his best poetry some what remote now.
― henri grenouille (Frogman Henry), Sunday, 30 May 2010 04:04 (fourteen years ago) link
Looking at that 'For Once, then, Something', is this mean to be so gauche? 'And lo'? 'Truth'?I know Lo is meant to make us think of 'low' but its pretty laughable. The repetition of words is effective, i grant.
― henri grenouille (Frogman Henry), Sunday, 30 May 2010 04:20 (fourteen years ago) link
please do continue to provide us with the illuminating first looks into Frost
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 07:23 (fourteen years ago) link
seriously dude, "I just looked at this and I have to say, nope, no sale" - save that for, like, TV shows or something & maybe read a critical appreciation of the poetry?
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 07:24 (fourteen years ago) link
Seriously, Frogman: read ten or a dozen poems before judging.
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 30 May 2010 12:10 (fourteen years ago) link
and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric
Not sure I agree with this. It does also allow me to correct something I said upthread about Yeats' 'magical poetry' which sounded like a gushing schoolgirl - I meant it actually as poetry about magic, rather than in the sense that poetry can be magical, although I think that's true in all sorts of cases.
Point being, I think that Yeats consistently finds something ineffable and beautiful from the mystical bric-a-brac, his prosaic, silly side. Do you find the arcane symbolism of The Tower gets in the way of 'O heart, O troubled heart'? Or all that crap about gyres? While not quite seperable, they are strangely unimportant, despite clearly being part of Yeats' poetic imagination.
In other words, the poetry (for me) usually wins over any rhetoric.
― GamalielRatsey, Sunday, 30 May 2010 12:52 (fourteen years ago) link
randall jarrell's criticism is a+++ phenomenal
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:40 (fourteen years ago) link
She is as in a field a silken tentAt midday when the sunny summer breezeHas dried the dew and all its ropes relent,So that in guys it gently sways at ease,And its supporting central cedar pole,That is its pinnacle to heavenwardAnd signifies the sureness of the soul,Seems to owe naught to any single cord,But strictly held by none, is loosely boundBy countless silken ties of love and thoughtTo every thing on earth the compass round,And only by one's going slightly tautIn the capriciousness of summer airIs of the slightlest bondage made aware.
- R. Frost, The Silken Tent
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:47 (fourteen years ago) link
my mid-to-late century homies:
bishoplarkinpongekeesmacniece
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:50 (fourteen years ago) link
"The Subverted Flower":
She drew back; he was calm:"It is this that had the power."And he lashed his open palmWith the tender-headed flower.He smiled for her to smile,But she was either blindOr willfully unkind.He eyed her for a whileFor a woman and a puzzle.He flicked and flung the flower,And another sort of smileCaught up like fingertipsThe corners of his lipsAnd cracked his ragged muzzle.She was standing to the waistIn golden rod and brake,Her shining hair displaced.He stretched her either armAs if she made it acheTo clasp her - not to harm;As if he could not spareTo touch her neck and hair."If this has come to usAnd not to me alone -"So she thought she heard him say;Though with every word he spokeHis lips were sucked and blownAnd the effort made him chokeLike a tiger at a bone.She had to lean away.She dared not stir a foot,Lest movement should provokeThe demon of pursuitThat slumbers in a brute.It was then her mother’s callFrom inside the garden wallMade her steal a look of fearTo see if he could hearAnd would pounce to end it allBefore her mother came.She looked and saw the shame:A hand hung like a paw,An arm worked like a sawAs if to be persuasive,An ingratiating laughThat cut the snout in half,And eye become evasive.A girl could only seeThat a flower had marred a man,But what she could not seeWas that the flower might beOther than base and fetid:That the flower had done but part,And what the flower beganHer own too meager heartHad terribly completed.She looked and saw the worst.And the dog or what it was,Obeying bestial laws,A coward save at night,Turned from the place and ran.She heard him stumble firstAnd use his hands in flight.She heard him bark outright.And oh, for one so youngThe bitter words she spitLike some tenacious bitThat will not leave the tongue.She plucked her lips for it,And still the horror clung.Her mother wiped the foamFrom her chin, picked up her comb,And drew her backward home.
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:50 (fourteen years ago) link
that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?
srsly u yanks are cute.
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:51 (fourteen years ago) link
y u i orta
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:52 (fourteen years ago) link
:D
nah i've not read much frost, it doesn't help that he's thought only in junior poetry/english cycles this side of the ocean tbh
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:53 (fourteen years ago) link
write-in voting for robert burns
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:56 (fourteen years ago) link
there are more heavy hitters polls to come
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:58 (fourteen years ago) link
I know the tradition on ILM would be "let's do twenty polls at once" but I figured let's get this big q out of the way and then continue
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 13:59 (fourteen years ago) link
Next poll:
English schoolsAmerican schools
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:03 (fourteen years ago) link
private or public?
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:06 (fourteen years ago) link
from what I'm told of Ireland I don't think the worst Manchester ghoul will be able to do aught but bow before the masters :(
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:17 (fourteen years ago) link
Finally voted. It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare (OR WAS HE???).
The Frost quoted here not doing much for me tbh - still where I was upthread and mostly hit by the earlier stuff (just reread 'Out, out' and hell yes). This feels woolier, less concrete, and the poet's sticking his head in a bit more; sounds ok, but I feel like I'm in the Graves league (which yes is a place I like to be), not the Yeats true vision league.
― woof, Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:21 (fourteen years ago) link
It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare
Or rather, he persuaded me right now because of that opaque inwardness that he's got - minds talking to themselves, jumping from image to image, losing you sometimes, picking at and around something and stretching language far to do it. When a Shakespeare contemporary gets difficult, it's often because you're missing an allusion; with Yeats, it's sometimes because he's wandered into private-symbol world (and sometimes it's because he's talking bollocks); with Shakespeare it's like he's thinking and discriminating and turning inwards - like he (in the sonnets) or a character are in an difficult argument with themselves (mid-late drama especially - Corialanus, Timon), stepping s'ways, skipping ahead, cutting back, reacing for images to articulate it.
There are bits of that around him in Fulke Greville and Donne maybe (the latter a gen down, so picking it up from the playhouses?), but it's never really allied elsewhere to such a straight-up prettypretty lyrical gift.
Anyway that is why I voted Shakespeare today.
― woof, Sunday, 30 May 2010 17:20 (fourteen years ago) link
I also admit that everything I'm praising could just be textual corruption.
It was very difficult for me to vote for Shakespeare given how much some of Yeats means to me. "But I, being poor, have only my dreams/I have spread my dreams under your feet/tread softly for you tread on my dreams"? All love poetry after that might as well go hang, that's as good as it's going to get. But then, you know, Will S.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man! Fool. O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing; here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool. Lear. Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children, You owe me no subscription: then, let fall Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.
I mean
you know
― henceforth we eat truffle fries (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Sunday, 30 May 2010 17:30 (fourteen years ago) link
lol at ppl shitting on robert frost
― max, Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:20 (fourteen years ago) link
shakespeare is so ridiculous
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:45 (fourteen years ago) link
ly amazing
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:46 (fourteen years ago) link
xxp do you file that thought under comedy, poetry or scat porn, though?
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:46 (fourteen years ago) link
passive-aggressive finickiness disguised as wit
― cozen, Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:47 (fourteen years ago) link
nah i cut all the pass-agg out of my diet tbph, but this is the shakespeare/yeats poll and frost will have his due consideration soon, i look fwd to more exposure.
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 19:50 (fourteen years ago) link
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:51 (8 hours ago) Bookmark
haha
― nakhchivan, Sunday, 30 May 2010 22:49 (fourteen years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Sunday, 30 May 2010 23:01 (fourteen years ago) link
i'm literally perning in a gyre with excitement
― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 23:06 (fourteen years ago) link
Mid-late-20th-Century:
Sceptr'd Isle
MacNeiceLarkinHill
God's Country
StevensMerrillBerrymanAmmons
― alimosina, Sunday, 30 May 2010 23:43 (fourteen years ago) link
My favorite Merrill poem. The last stanza kills me.
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 30 May 2010 23:43 (fourteen years ago) link
For Lear WS needed almost superhuman self-control. For all his gyres I don't think Yeats could go there.
― alimosina, Monday, 31 May 2010 02:11 (fourteen years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Monday, 31 May 2010 23:01 (fourteen years ago) link
this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
― max, Monday, 31 May 2010 23:04 (fourteen years ago) link