Rolling Contemporary Poetry

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.

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