what poetry are you reading

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

i've read herrick but idk if i've read him y'know

you gotta do the hesperides all as a thing, none of this anthologized 'virgins' junk

man that shit sounds long though

well i thought for a second he was out of print but no, there is a lovely £125 edition from OUP last year. same for the next volume with commentary.

they're all super short tho, it's like a 17th c. blog

i luckily happened into a well-appointed old norton complete poetry of, for some reason he went so out of fashion that they seem to have stopped printing him, but there must be something like that kicking around your dusty old country

doing Stephen Dobyns' velocities: new and selected now--a lot of it doesn't resonate so much, but the occasional piece of music breaks through--

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day's labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

man that is some p egregious prose w line breaks you got there

one good thing about the seventeeth century was, they knew where you put a line break, and knew it hard

actually that bit includes the indentation at the start of the second line onwards that suggests this is all 'one line'

so

Prose poetry is exceedingly difficult to qualify as poetry. Very few attempts succeed. Rimbaud managed that trick better than most.

all poem it seems the purpose of each reader's labor is simply to bring each line into focus.

Love, love Dobyns's Cemetery Nights and "Beauty."

Prose poems: loved Killarney Clary's books; still might.

Here's Beauty.

The Tobacco Shop

Generally think of Michael Hofmann as a bit of a crepe but was moved by the insane hyperbole of his LRB rave to give Karen Solie a whirl and, wow, she's pretty great.

Also catching up with Harry Clifton's new selected, which feels a little over-refined in comparison.

Hofmann is a man of 'extremes' - he's more like a rock journo at points: a good, and a bad, thing. The LRB needs him tho'.

Really enjoyed that piece too.

picked up Ashbery's "Quick Question," also just ordered selected Auden. haven't read much Ashbery and am sort of struggling for a way in.