what poetry are you reading

ah yeah i just read that one last night too, damn near devoured the whole little selected in a few hours

so much to chew on

those fuckin sonnets

I'm an admirer of Berryman's sonnets, too. He leaves enough of the trad structure intact that it frees his sense of language, imagery and ideas to climb forward, and his plays against the trad sonnet structure gain extra weight because they are so deliberate.

i got halfway through this great long thing on berryman on the bus home last night, stopped reading to start reading the selected, then picked it back up and realized the whole thing is sort of a long-form review of the selected itself. happy accident.

man sharon olds' the dead and the living just came in and i tried to read a bit of it before bed

fuckin mistake.

just awful dark stuff, not meant for the pillow.

mary karr's viper rum is winning me over though. every third one or so is a gut punch, like a slightly unstiffened O'Connor. and i like my O'Connor just fine.

This has a lovely cover, but the prose poems it consists of did nothing for me.
http://ndbooks.com/images/made/images/covers/Fullblood_Arabian_300_450.jpg
I found them facile and pseudo-profound (the nod to Khalil Gibran in Lydia Davis's introduction should have tipped me off), but plenty of people disagree with me.

there is just so much in Olds; they're not even so panoramic, just so full and imaginable. three a day, max.

& wait is TDATL the recent one?

nah its one from the early 80s.

Petrarch b/w English Alliterative Revival stuff; then a reading of Villon's Testament to close the middle ages

newyear

Seaton's version of Cold Mountain Poems.

read a.e. housman's 'a shropshire lad' on my kindle a few weeks ago. uneven but some great stuff.

rereading Walcott after all the attention over the new collected poems.

i read goethe and herrick, felt very leisured and cultured

like an Englishman in 1841.

xp ya Housman's great, seems underappreciated (maybe due to the conservatism of his forms?) but the books qua books hold together really well

Housman attracted such immoderate adulation in his day that there had to be a reaction against him for a time. Now it's safe to dust him off and put him back into his niche.

Aimless I forget, are you a UK poster?

that Shambhala Editions Cold Mountain Poems has caught my eye many times in B&N without my ever buying it... I've put so much effort into learning to appreciate european poetry these past few years, it's made me very reluctant to explore other traditions, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time

I post from Oregon, USA, where I've lived about 57 of my 59 years. But when you love literature and are a monoglot in English, you learn to love English lit.

newyear

― xyzzzz__, Friday, February 28, 2014 8:50 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wow

At the moment, I've been dipping into my copy of Padraic Colum's poetry, titled Poems, a late compilation that does not identify itself as a 'collected poems of'. Padraic can't be described as anything but a "minor poet", but he had a nice touch when he keeps his loftier ambitions in check. Methinks the mere existence of Yeats lifted the work of every Irish poet well above what they could have achieved without him.

Just before that I was paddling around in the poetry of Stevie Smith and in doing so I decided to remove her from my shelves and sell her off during my next selling spree. A few of her early poems have charm, but her charms are very rapidly exhausted.

yknow, i think i would really enjoy a history of american poetry whose driving narrative was basically repetitions of

'i am the poet of america!!!'

'no you're not fukk u'

america's one true poet was t.s. eliot iirc

FITE!

rrrr tom you know me TOO WELL fukk u

no you know what ts eliot was the one true poet of 20th c. britannia and after that you guys have been up shit's creek, no bard to sing your songs, how does it feel

i mean we got like. geoffrey hill and shit, i dunno

rereading an old Helen Vendler collection published in the late seventies. Essays on Moore, Merrill, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Stevens, and Gluck.

and, like, carol ann duffy

all bases covered, is what i'm saying

albion liveth still and everafter

but they'll be doing it in the Championship come August

can't see how anybody cd mistake Eliot's hyper-tense class paranoia for anything other than oh shit hold on

so yeah i really don't have the stomach for louise gluck

she's a bit of a psychosexual hack tbh

nah that was your mother

which Gluck you been reading? I dig the two most recent collections, particularly A Village Life, where she sounds like an aging writer trying to age faster(?)

Ararat and The House on Marshland. The first book felt too glib.

i was reading the other one that starts with a and the one with the boat on the cover

Meanwhile, apropos of the ongoing surrealism obsession mentioned on the other "what are you reading" thread, I picked up the recent (1990s) English translation of Breton's Clair de terre, which is mostly baffling, occasionally charming (as in the 'poem' listing off all of the Bretons in the Paris phonebook), and lacks a parallel French text due to copyright issues (boo!). Also bought a Gerard de Nerval selected works (not the Penguin edition, an older one, translated by Wagner--the Encyclopedia of Literary Translations into English praises his handling of the poetry, moreso than the novellas), which I am enjoying in spite of its hermetic density of allusion & personal mythology.

I should clarify: de Nerval's prose works (of which I've only tackled 'Sylvie' thus far) do not strike me as terribly obscure; but the poetry, which abounds in allusions both Classical and Medieval (thank heaven for endnotes!), seems also to take for granted a familiarity with the prose.

I haven't read De Nerval in years, but I enjoyed the copy I use to have. I think it was published by Exact Change. My favorite surrealist was Eluard, but sadly I never found a complete translation of him. I always wanted to like Lautréamont, but I never enjoyed actually reading him. Have you read Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton by Mark Polizzotti? Breton was such a curious guy, I sort of hate him and love him.

the Polizzotti biography was recommended in the other thread; I may look into once I finish the Balakian, or if a cheap copy falls into my lap.

Maldoror is wonderful in small doses & particular moods, but the narrowness of its emotional range can get kind of suffocating. I don't know what to make of the Poesies, and I find the body of critical literature around Lautreamont somewhat maddening (possible exception: Gaston Bachelard's monograph, which I remember being decently insightful... I can't make heads or tails of Blanchot's long essay, though, & I usually dig his criticism)

Marvell. I don't know why

I recently finished Anne Carson's latest book, Red Doc>, her oblique successor to Autobiography of Red, and while I enjoyed it I found it frustratingly diffuse in comparison to the earlier book or Nox. The strongest passages in the book, which focus on the death of G/Geryon's mother, follow from the Celan-pastiche lyrics on mourning in Decreation but seem a little too loosely connected to Red Doc>'s earlier wisps of narrative. I'll probably find more in it on a second reading, though.

To be clear, I don't generally read Carson for the sake of narrative.

i think the exact change edition of nerval had the poems translated by robert duncan from memory and they used the earlier wagner translations for the stories. and yeah, the chimera poems are pretty dense with classical/esoteric allusions (haven't read the wagner edition i have of his work yet, but it has a lot more editorial matter than the exact change). aurelia is a trip, and if you ever see a copy of his journey to the orient it's a+ 19th century orientalism

i read maldoror in snatches over lunch breaks while studying and loved it, so maybe it's best to approach it in pieces? (also have his complete works sitting here unread, so need to read poesies sometime too)

i think i prefer what i've read of the parasurrealist poets more than the actual thing, people like michaux & daumal, etc

which reminds me of the very to the point and hilarious open letter daumal wrote to breton after rejecting the latter's invitation to join the surrealists which ends with daumal inviting breton to join his own group and includes this classic kiss off: "beware of eventually figuring in the study guides to literary history"

Marvell's flecknoe poem is pretty good. I feel like I enjoy the prose translations provided of his Latin and Greek verse more so than I do his English verse, though, which is probably a sign that seventeenth c . verse is just not for me.

bro u gotta read herrick

Slowly reading my way through the 2022 Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers anthology. The longer narrative poems tend to feature lots of death and weird sex, and the shorter lyric ones are defiantly nihilistic in a sort of zen way. Recommended.

correction: 2002, not 2022.

Review of Prynne's poetry written in the last few years. 700.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/raspberries

thanks xyzzz. These were those chapbooks i was enthusing about so often in 2020-2021

Yup, thought you'd be interested

Anne Carson's 'The Glass Essay'. Well now.

It is very cold
walking into the long scraped April wind.
At this time of year there is no sunset
just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away.

Last night I was reading Sam Hamill's translations of Bashō's travel diaries and selected other haiku.

Masturbating for My Life by Mickie Kennedy

So bored of my porn-glutted hours, I’ve begun
jerking it to straight stuff.
Today, I’ve settled on an older German nurse

dispassionately milking a sperm donor,
stroking with the intensity
of a woman who doesn’t flinch when she snaps

a chicken’s neck. I’m trying to match
her furious rhythm, so fast
it burns. There’s something

thrilling in the sexlessness—
her lubed-up gloves
glinting in the fluorescent light.

Out of nowhere, my nurse is replaced
by Randy’s face. A call.
Another call. The man I love, a king

of terrible timing. His voice
is frantic: Honey, there’s a bird. A dying
bird in the middle of the driveway.

What does he think I can do?
I’ll be there soon, I lie,
returning to my task. I’m not

some avian Jesus, I’m just a man
who’s moving through
another fragile cure. A gloved hand

squeezes the donor’s family jewels.

It looks like they might burst.
He writhes. I writhe.

Randy calls again,
but I hit ignore. I’m yanking myself
inside my life. If something needs to die,

let it be the bird.

I just started going through a colleague's Queer Lit syllabus from the Fall and looking up things I don't know, which mostly consist of her poetry selections. Today I read:

Countee Cullen, “Tableau” (Harlem Renaissance)
Chen Chen, “Summer” (contemporary)

Both lovely.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (2019)

Kind of a big deal here in Canada--at least within lit circles. I'm only reading a few poems at a time in between grading, and I'm honestly not totally sold yet. Kinda waiting them to get queerer.

There is a pretty funny poem called "Leonardo DiCaprio" that is basically the poet trashing The Revenant, though (haven't seen).

*waiting for

crypto, BRB’s work has always left me cold. i just don’t think the poems are very good. the political advocacy and similar work they do seems much more potent.