what poetry are you reading

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.

also i am considering printing out her tumblr posts so i can read them at leisure

yeah what about all the I MUST WRITE AN EPIC modernists?? (of course they did it by shmushing lyrics together but)

i am reading SPRING AND ALL (we make bratwurst of them) again

i mean come on this is so cheap

10. I don’t tell you any of this. I would like you to make a poem you can turn into a thousand ships and a thousand ships you can turn into unimagined forms, alphabets too, the epics of the spaces between your eyelashes, poems with which you learn how to make anything old into anything new, but mostly the world.

yeah none of what they tell you ever ends up contesting ossified orthodoxies in favor of TURNING YOUR POEM INTO A HEART

Boyer's list as I read it is directed against the culture of MFA programs and mainstream poetry journals (which do seem to focus on the lyric) and the more dessicated forms of Conceptual Poetry (i.e. Kenneth Goldsmith), and also functions indirectly as a defense of her own political poetry; the other notes in the series on poetry are subtler in thinking about the relation between language and politics, but it seemed worth linking to what was then the most recent one.

certainly - but it reads like a rehash of decades of langpo poetics re same. it's irritating that poetry is so required to have this constant accompaniment of theoretical posturing to 'defend' it (arguably for institutional reasons that are not too far off from MFA culture, publication demands, etc!) that it results in so much… indulgence.

I'm reading View with a Grain of Sand, a selection of poems by Wistawa Szymborska. I enjoy her intellectual playfulness, which seems to run through every one of her poems, even when they are wistful or bleak.

yesterday i checked out from the library collected poems by david markson and questions of travel by elizabeth bishop and read the first poem in each.

i hope to read more.

Flowers of Evil (tr. Richard Howard)

Also began on The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, appreciate the depth and range of coverage - its great to read Lermontov's poetry for the first time and more Pushkin (although I dislike the description of him as the equivalent of Goethe in Germany). Always more Pushkin.

The problem is there is almost too much of it, have people forgot how to curate? Something of the length of Faber book of German/Italian 20th century poems would be more preferable. I know the project covers a bigger period.

Its only a quibble at the moment.

Taking a break from the mighty The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry to read some shorter books from Roberto Bolano and Apollinaire. Bolano was just good at fkn everything, scary.

"Boyer's list as I read it is directed against the culture of MFA programs and mainstream poetry journals (which do seem to focus on the lyric) and the more dessicated forms of Conceptual Poetry (i.e. Kenneth Goldsmith), and also functions indirectly as a defense of her own political poetry; the other notes in the series on poetry are subtler in thinking about the relation between language and politics, but it seemed worth linking to what was then the most recent one.

― one way street, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 4:03 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

yeah this was what i was wondering -- idk -- are MFA programs really so backwards?? is there really such a thing as a 'mainstream poetry journal'?? --

i never looked at maggie nelson's bluets because MFA ha ha ha, then i saw it has some kind of wittgenstein connection, and it and her recent work has all kind of gendery stuff in it, so i took a look - turned out it seemed to have fully integrated the 'dessicated' and the 'political' into MFA-ish refracted lyricism, so i guess my picture of mfa programs needed some updating

the wittgenstein part was total shit though, just pointless pastiche used to add a veneer of culture it seemed

The problem is there is almost too much of it, have people forgot how to curate?

Or edit and anthologise, yes - and you're right, Hofmann's 20th C German poems is a fantastic exception. I noticed this with biography about a decade ago - including everything, pertinent or not, so a narrative gets drowned in impedimenta. Feels like academic/research methods dictate selection, and perhaps a fear of imposing an editorial view. That's fine if you've got one of those grand apparatus 12 volume collections with footnotes up to your eyeballs, but it makes it unwieldy, and for the casual but interested reader, difficult to access.

yeah this was what i was wondering -- idk -- are MFA programs really so backwards?? is there really such a thing as a 'mainstream poetry journal'?? --
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, May 6, 2015 9:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're right, "mainstream poetry journals" was hasty and imprecise (I think we can agree that Silliman's opposition between the comfortable poets of the "School of Quietude" and the experimentalists of the "post-avant" is dubiously neat), and my vague secondhand impression of MFA culture (from speaking to some friends who have been part of one particular program) is that MFA programs aren't necessarily hostile to radical or collective projects but don't foster them--nor would one expect them to, since (at least from outside) they seem to mostly serve a professionalizing function. Anyway, I was hastily sketching out the vision of the literary scene that Boyer seems to be trying to ward away rather than necessarily endorsing that vision as true. I think Boyer's fifth note on poetry is probably more useful in making explicit her anxiety that poetry mostly serves a decorative function in society:

Sometimes it’s easy to believe that poetry is decorative to the leisure of the children of the rich or a flourish to a cop car or a form of banking and pacification or a strident and fractured whining or a frame with nothing in it but Kenny Goldsmith and everyone else’s blood. Sometimes it’s easy to believe also that the object world is anchorless and unenchanted and that the choice is mfa and new york city and that every against is a for, every contra- will be transmuted into a pro-, then to believe in the abstracted everywhereness of nothing and in the complicated habits of techno-courtiers and the harried morning, the harried noontime, the harried afternoon, the harried evening, the harried midnight. Then perhaps easy to mistake the couple for the commune, to mistake the family for nature, to forget the object world is anchored and enchanted, to mistake for intelligence the weak theory emancipated from emancipation in the prisonhouse of doctorates or to mistake for necessary the thoughts of the upright slender white fathers and sons. Then it is easy to believe the word “struggle” attached to the “my” of a king, to mistake it for true, also, when they say the light of the screen in your face is fate and not history and to mistake it for inevitability that requires you to wear a nametag to work, then to mistake it for your own agency to smile at bosses or customers or men. Sometimes it is easy to wake up Easter morning and write “books are the detritus of tragic industry” but then to remember that apart from any book and earlier than any fake-inevitablity and later than any fake-inevitability too there is refusal and dialectic and our compañeras and possibility and every living, circulating, necessary poem.

Or edit and anthologise, yes - and you're right, Hofmann's 20th C German poems is a fantastic exception.

I'd urge you or anyone to look at the Italian Faber collection (there is also a French poetry one which I haven't seen). I wish that Faber had done a Russian one.

Feels like academic/research methods dictate selection, and perhaps a fear of imposing an editorial view.

I was going through some more last night and there was one point where a poem was selected to say (and I paraphrase) 'this poet is not very good but we are selecting because the translator deserves to be remembered' and I thought this was one instance of what you might be describing. Academic can be great - sometimes ideas can't help to be complex and dry, or placing a bigger limit on your demand but here it doesn't work - feels indulgent.

I think Robert Chandler's project (or what I see as his project) of rescuing Russian prose from just being Dostoevsky vs Tolstoy plus a few 19th century guys - and having any other Russian prose rising to the fore due to its political circumstances in a tabloidy manner (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn) rather than because it is great conflicted art (Platonov, Shamalov etc) is great for prose but its coming up a cropper for poetry.

- 150 pgs cover 1750s - 1900. Don't think its anyone's fault but I'm finding it hard to connect with anyone else but Pushkin (apart from Lermontov but then again he has a notable work of prose as well)

- There are then nearly 400 pages for 20th century, etc. But as I'm going through it a lot of this seems to have been well covered elsewhere. Futurism, Acmeists. 200/400 cover the 1910s-1930s I'd say, not an exactly neglected period. A few of the poets I haven't heard much of have frustratingly few poems and I note them here to chase: Kuzmin is brilliant - any fans of Cavafy would like. Voloshin can be explosive. Sofia Parnok has an interesting biog, frustrating to have three short poems. They are really good! At the moment I'd say it would've been worth sacrificing earlier eras for more from these. This set of translations by Paul Schmidt looks like a better shaping of that period.

- Throughout we have biog intros to the poet ranging from 1-5 pages. An anxiety to have context (and maybe cover the fact that some of these poets should have more poems?) Faber is good for just letting it be. Trusts the reader to chase up on any threads.

- Then it samples the latter part of the 20th century, which I haven't got to properly yet, and meant to showcase Shamalov's poetry (among others). Skipped to some of these and I'd say its the book's big selling point/contribution.

I'd urge you or anyone to look at the Italian Faber collection

i bought this, in fact I bought it in january, but it never got delivered. Realised this a couple of weeks ago (possibly as a result of this thread in fact), and they apologised and sent it out immediately. Haven't looked into it properly yet, though an immediate response was 'i know fuck all about italian poetry'.