what poetry are you reading

tanx

can anyone comment on Bill Shute's Kendra Steiner editions?

was gonna order the new Matt Krefting CDr and figured I'd take a chapbook or two while i'm at it. feeling rather sheepish in that poetry has always been something of a cultural blindspot for me, so i've little in the way of references here.

Philip Levine RIP.

oh shit

All those GI-era poets were born within a year of each other: Strand, Kinnell, Levine, Merrill, Merwin, Ashbery, James Wright...

GI-bill (whether or not they qualified)

just finished reading this. its a good one.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2512/the-art-of-poetry-no-39-philip-levine

woof - this is the Cavafy - Pessoa film I was telling you about (and for anyone else in the thread, a random find).

What?

thanks xyzzzz! I look forward to getting a chance to look at that.

Currently reading + enjoying R F Langley. Very very slim collected, that's how I like it now.

Points for a Compass Rose, Evan S. Connell. Pretty clearly influenced by Pound and by a strong disaffection from catholic church. Connell shows a large competence and facility with language, but his poetics here aren't about language. His metrical invention is very subdued and barely registers a pulse. His interest seems all concentrated on the distillation of his ideas.

Picked up Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us, essays on ~contemporary American poets~. She calls Berryman "unhanded by the world" which I really liked.

^^^^ I love that book.

I'm starting Ariana Reines's The Cow, which looks at femininity, abjection, the voraciousness of capital, and places of indistinction between humanity and animal with an abrasive verve, and which goes further than most of the appropriation-prone poetry I've read in both exploring and eliciting disgust. I'm finishing Saeed Jones's more formally traditional but graceful first book, Prelude to Bruise, which is unsparing about the ubiquity of anti-black violence writ large (Jasper, TX) and woven into ordinary intimacy, and also has some of my favorite recent lyric poems on desire:

Boy in a Whalebone Corset

The acre of grass is a sleeping
swarm of locusts, and in the house
beside it, tears too are mistaken.
thin streams of kerosene
when night throws itself against
the wall, when Nina Simone sings
in the next room without her body
and I’m against the wall, bruised
but out of mine: dream-headed
with my corset still on, stays
slightly less tight, bones against
bones, broken glass on the floor,
dance steps for a waltz
with no partner. Father in my room
looking for more sissy clothes
to burn. Something pink in his fist,
negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.
His son’s a whore this last night
of Sodom. And the record skips
and skips and skips. Corset still on,
nothing else, I’m at the window;
he’s in the field, gasoline jug,
hand full of matches, night made
of locusts, column of smoke
mistaken for Old Testament God.

"indistinction between humanity and animality," I mean

hey wow i just started reines' mercury, am loving it so far,

The Black Earth

I called my brother
It started to rain
We got bedbugs he said
You already told me I said, you said
The exterminators were coming
Not til Wednesday he said
Are they biting you I asked
A ton he said, all over. I wanted to know
What it felt like, the bites. They’re super
Itchy he said but I have some what do you call it
Cortaid. You have to get rid of your mattress
I said, Get rid of it, and wash the sheets
And everything you own, look on the internet.
What’s the point of washing everything when the exterminators
Are coming Wednesday he said. Wednesday
Is far away I said and no matter what you have to get rid
Of your mattress because you won’t be able to keep it because
The bugs lay eggs in there.
It rained on me in my world.
Last night I saw a picture of my brother
On Facebook. He was in high school and dressed
For the prom, with intense dark eyes and the strong
Throat of early manhood. Now he lets bugs
Eat him. The lobes of his head bulge. His body
Swells as he gives himself away. I let
Bugs eat me in my dreams. I relate to the glamor
Of certain homeless women. Glamor on which
Their humanity depends, not the crutch
Of common fate.
His flesh is yellow gray no matter what
I say. I accept to take colors
To get through the day by their light.
Lost women keening at me sideways
On the subway to compliment my shoes
Smelling of shit in an extraordinary combination of textures
And prints, one gold
Tooth in their heads. The way junky
Ladies suck on candy canes. I could disappear
Into that world forever, the one where I measure out my needs
Against some evil Calvinist who knows nothing
Of the armor a woman must wear. I and my jealous, narrow heart
Have disappeared into that world
I think about being a person to rule
The internet with my finite goals
And self-possession, like the false
Simplicity of this. I think about the fat I want
To consolidate my sorrow in this world, I want it in my ass
And thighs. Wouldn’t it be nice to round out my self with whosoever’s mouth
Could just pout in silence and be fair. Little simplicity
If any is transmitted by me. It would be good to transmit
Impossibility simply; not the same thing. I see his face
Eaten by bugs and years of forcefed legal drugs
As a zebra cadaver swells with rot and worms, as my heart
Swells with love for what cannot
Respond. If he wants to let the bugs eat his face
He will let them. I stand here frankly
Using my imagination, my heart
In batten, not doing a thing.

I love that. There's something impressively unforced about Reines's language no matter how far she goes into extremity.

That Philip Levine interview Scott linked is really good. Makes me want to pick up some of his work.

Lately, in terms of poetry, I read Philip Larkin's Collected Poems straight through (it's not very long), and now I'm dipping here and there into a Les Murray collection.

in spasms i'm reading high windows by larkin, too - even slimmer, & just crazily consistent & strong - & it's so rich; i know he's kinda fairly present or well described as narrator, this ornery, wearisome grumpy guy, but putting that out of mind or fresh to it the reflective, regretful mood is just always so strong-

Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

l wanted them over.
Hurried to burial
And looked back on

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the Windows
of an opaque childhood.

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come.
And when the birds go.

+ hey one way street that's very well put; something planimetric about the writing, that it can express personally & then describe fantastically & not even notably seem to change register in between

Philip Larkin's Collected Poems straight through (it's not very long)

is that right!

might have to grab that

i know he's kinda fairly present or well described as narrator, this ornery, wearisome grumpy guy

I think that's partly why I found it fairly easy to read the collected poems straight through, as I usually would with a novel but rarely with poems: that consistent narrative voice and similarity of mood made it easier for me to key into each poem, without the initial disorientation that I would feel with a more eclectic or diverse poet. That persistent gloominess, shot through with occasional rays of wonder or awe, makes it easier to vibe off the atmosphere even if I occasionally skimmed over some of the subtleties of metaphor or syntax.

Also there are recurring motifs, like his unhappy childhood - so a brief reference, like in the poem above, evokes a richer context after reading other poems on the topic.

I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes

"they turn machine guns into songs and songs into machine guns/the hand of freedom without lies/the hand that Fidel shook" -- Nazim Hikmet

following it up with Yannos Ritsos and a Victor Serge novel so that's what I am all about this week.

leaves of grass!!

at the used book store yesterday I picked up a Yeats collected poems (to replace my old copy which remains in the possession of an ex) + Harold Bloom's monograph on Yeats (with a bonus postcard from Yeats' grave site tucked between the pages!)

otm xp

Nicanor Parra!

THE VICES OF THE MODERN WORLD

Modern delinquents
Are authorized to convene daily in parks and gardens.
Equipped with powerful binoculars and pocket watches
They break into kiosks favored by death
And install their laboratories among the rosebushes in full flower.
From there they direct the photographers and beggars that roam the neighborhood
Trying to raise a small temple to misery
And, if they get a chance, having some woebegone shoeshine boy.
The cowed police run from these monsters
Making for the middle of town
Where the great year's end fires are breaking out
And a hooded hero is robbing two nuns at gun point.

The vices of the modern world:
The motor car and the movies,
Racial discrimination,
The extermination of the Indian,
The manipulations of high finance,
The catastrophe of the aged,
The clandestine white-slave trade carried on by international sodomites,
Self-advertisement and gluttony,
Expensive funerals,
Personal friends of His Excellency,
The elevation of folklore to a spiritual category,
The abuse of soporifics and philosophy,
The softening-up of men favored by fortune,
Autoeroticism and sexual cruelty,
The exaltation of the study of dreams and the subconscious to the detriment of common sense,
The exaggerated faith in serums and vaccines,
The deification of the phallus,
The international spread-legs policy patronized by the reactionary press,
The unbounded lust for power and money,
The gold rush,
The fatal dollar dance,
Speculation and abortion,
The destruction of idols,
Overdevelopment of dietetics and pedagogical psychology,
The vices of dancing, of the cigarette, of games of chance,
The drops of blood that are often found on the sheets of newlyweds,
The madness for the sea,
Agoraphobia and claustrophobia,
The disintegration of the atom,
The gory humor of the theory of relativity,
The frenzy to return to the womb,
The cult of the exotic,
Airplane accidents,
Incinerations, mass purges, retention of passports,
All this just because,
To produce vertigo,
Dream-analysis,
And the spread of radiomania.

As has been demonstrated
The modern world is composed of artificial flowers
Grown under bell jars like death,
It is made of movie stars
And blood-smeared boxers fighting by moonlight
And nightingale-men controlling the economic lives of the nations
With certain easily explained devices;
Usually they are dressed in black like precursors of autumn
And eat roots and wild herbs.
Meanwhile the wise, gnawed by rats,
Rot in the crypts of cathedrals
And souls with the slightest nobility are relentlessly persecuted by the police.

The modern world is an enormous sewer,
The chic restaurants are stuffed with digesting corpses
And birds flying dangerously low.
That's not all: the hospitals are full of impostors,
To say nothing of those heirs of the spirit who found colonies in the anus of each new surgical case.

Modern industrialists occasionally suffer from the effects of the poisoned atmosphere.
They are stricken at their sewing machines by the terrifying sleeping sickness
Which eventually turns them into angels, of a sort.
They deny the existence of the physical world
And brag about being poor children of the grave.
And yet the world has always been like this.
Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor lost
And poetry is in things themselves or is merely a mirage of the spirit.
I admit that a well-planned earthquake
Can wipe out a city rich in traditions in a matter of seconds,
And that a meticulous aerial bombardment
Smashes trees, horses, thrones, music,
But what does it matter
If, while the world's greatest ballerina
Is dying, poor and abandoned, in a village in southern France,
Spring restores to man a few of the vanished flowers.

What I say is, let's try to be happy, sucking on the miserable human rib.
Let's extract from it the restorative liquid,
Each one following his personal inclinations.
Let's cling to this divine table scrap!
Panting and trembling,
Let's suck those lips that drive us wild.
The lot is cast.
Let's breathe in this enervating and destructive perfume
And for one more day live the life of the elect.
Out of his armpits man extracts the wax he needs to mold the faces of his idols
And out of woman's sex the straw and the mud for his temples.
Therefore
I grow a louse on my tie
And smile at the imbeciles descending from the trees.

I ordered my first book of Antipoems recently. there is N O good poetry in it -- Not One. only Antipoetry as far as the I can C

There are some really good runs in these. Trying to chase up on what Bolano likes (reading his Between Parenthesis collection): Lihn, Gimferrer, Dario and so on. I think its going to be bloody hard to find much, Parra is all I've found thus far.

Maybe I need to actually start re-learning Spanish.

got a selected schwartz in the mail yesterday! lovely old stuff.

Lately, mostly Eileen Myles's Not Me:

I imitate her and
I don't do it well. She didn't leave her wallet
or us in a store.
I'm just a pale imitation
it is simply not my style
to open the hearts of strangers to my true
personhood. I hope you accept
this tiny confession of what
I am currently going through.
And if you are experiencing something of similar nature
tell someone, not me,
but tell someone. It's the new
human program to be in. It would
be nice for at least
these final moments if
we could sigh
with the relief
of being in
the same program
with all the
other humans
whispering
in school. I can't quite locate
this terror, but I am trying
to be my mother
or Edward the Confessor
smiling down on you with up-praying
hands.

I found a copy of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language for fifty cents. I bought it, brought it home, and I've been reading it. So far I've liked it very well, whereas when I've picked up some of her later collections and browsed them to see how I liked them, I didn't respond to them nearly as favorably. I don't know why.

so hey does anybody get their poetry in blog form

new poetry? nah
I do find blogs useful for big-name 20th-century stuff that has yet to pass into the public domain

Four Greek Poets collection (includes 2x nobel prize winners on this, I clearly needed to bump up my quota of Nobel Prize winners this week!)

Somwhat more seriously I can't quite get into Cavafy. Fairly dry set of historical poems, or maybe its the selection. Seferis and esp Elytis I like.

John Donne selection. Onto some Hardy and Lawrence next.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but re Cavafy I am a sucker for poised reflective historical melancholia.

― woof, Tuesday, 28 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally wrong on this - made my way through Cavafy's complete poems and its a book for all time. Such a singular sensibility and reading 'em is also trippy: you have these historical poems alongside passionate homoeroticism. Not valuing one over the other - it would be easy to. The Historical poems are a bit more work to decode, you may want to look at notes but actually I also felt it was unnecessary. The characters he revives from Greek history and myth are given emotions to express, he always makes them more than cut outs.

All done in the best free verse I've read since Pessoa

Need to check back on the excerpts from the Penguin. Just as likely I picked this up on the wrong day. Or maybe the selection didn't work.

I changed my opinion from the v first poem in the collection. Nothing historical or erotic here.

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind—
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

I suppose I've often needed a bit of existential grease to get me going.

I'm reading the new Merrill bio!

Not poetry, but -adjacent: I've been reading Anne Boyer's series of short notes on poetics, most recently What They Will Say to Deter You:

2. They will tell you not to look around, tell you that the only thing that is poetry is lyric poetry. Whatever is not lyric, what is always arising (how can you not also notice it?) they will tell you is definitionally not poetry. Whatever is lyric they will tell you is poetry, even when it is not.

3. They will tell you not to look back, that lyric poetry is universally the lyric as it is revived in European romanticism, but they won’t actually say this, they will say that this particular and historical form of the lyric is also what is ahistorical and has existed forever. It will be very confusing to be a historical subject who is taught to read a historically particular form of poetry ahistorically and then also to read every other poem as if it were a poem not from its time but from that one. You will be given only one way to read a poem, and therefore you will be expected to impose on every “poem” a restrictive and exclusive poemness. Each poem you will be asked to identify as such will be used to exclude all of the others. A poem becomes the problem with borders.

4. The people who have thought this far about poetry and consider themselves very aesthetically advanced and will go around putting the frame of the poem on everything. This is because a hundred years ago a man from Europe thought to do this to a toilet. These aesthetically advanced people enthralled to the acts of a hundred years ago will frame corpses, graveyards, transcripts, autopsy reports, student loan bills, and newspaper articles with “poetry.” They will make you think that poetry is a dune buggy race between nominalists.

5. You will pay for the sins of Percy Shelley but you will not know why.

yeah they're really great
making something as vague as poetry month mean something

the miguel james poems she posted, & i think translated, too, are really wonderful

You want flowers
Me, a horse, a guitar
And to never work, never, never.

http://www.typomag.com/issue18/james.html

this is kind of what i am getting at when i am getting at Where Are The Poetry Blogs

i am also open to poetry via twitter

feel like i'm bargaining here

These might not be quite what you're looking for, but I'm partial to Jackie Wang's blog, as well as Bhanu Kapil's:

http://loneberry.tumblr.com/
http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com/?view=classic

Also, the contents of the latest issue of my favorite communist poetry journal, Lana Turner, are available here:

http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/contents/print-issue-7-contents-2

Cathy Park Hong's "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" is essential, but it's a strong issue throughout.

no hey that's great, thank you. hyped to read. i just feel like there are stretches of time - the afternoon at work; 1am on a cellphone - super suited to reading shorter poems through tired eyes.

did you read any of the bhanu kapil books? i've only ever dipped into them in bookstores, she seems great.

I really want to read Ban, but I'm too broke to buy books and it seems to be registered by my library but absent from the stacks. I'll stop adding to my recommendations for now, but I just remembered Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's blog (which I stumbled across out of an interest in trans poetics and trans women's writing):

http://joshuajenniferespinoza.com/

i am also open to poetry via twitter

― tender is the late-night daypart (schlump), Wednesday, 22 April 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah yes :-)

I follow George Szirtes, he often tweets poetry or stories he is writing.

lol i signed up for the academy of american poets' 'poem-a-day' email service, i am web 2.0

anne boyer's list of shit they say seems ... weirdly outside my experience of what people who do english lit are meant to think, like the exact opposite. i wonder if its an MFA thing or an american thing she's talking about.