what poetry are you reading

Re-reading a Selected Roethke with a fresher sensitivity. So lovely.

From Twitter:

http://www.africanpoetryprize.org/winning-poems-2015

that Safia Elhillo is some of the best poetry I've read in a while

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/each-day-unexpected-salvation-john-cage

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=78

I've read this a couple of times and could not resist quoting:

[...] It would be December.
A jade horse beneath the waters
A double transparency, a line in mid-air
All these things at your fingertips
All undone through the portal of time
Silent and blue. [...]

[And ... ]

[...] It little matters to me
Being nothing around you, a shadow, tattered stuff
In the judgement of your mother and sister. [...]

[Reckless ... save yourself ... give what you can ... when it comes to you]

I bought a copy of Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres, tr. Frederick Goldin, and just finished the section on Guillaume IX before supper.

berryman's dream songs

dennis johnson - incognito lounge, at the moment.

in more of a nonfic mood at the moment but oh man i love hilda hilst

Bhanu Kapil's Ban En Banlieue

reading through a selected adrienne rich right now, enamored

also picked up the out of print book of berryman critical essays "the freedom of the poet"

I can't read Rich after 1980 :(

Of the Rich I've browsed around in, I best liked The Dream of a Common Language, which also fits Alfred's criteria of pre-1980 poems.

Her Dickinson essay is one of the most lucid things about her I've read.

I can't read Rich after 1980 :(

Is this like a poetry after Auschwitz thing? What happened in 1980?

Her verse collapsed into well-meaning doggerel.

its funny i met someone recently who's reading her from the present day backwards, and i'm sure we must have very different impressions

I got an affection for the first collections of poets like Rich, Berryman, Merrill.

What do y'all think of John Hollander and Anthony Hecht?

I like Hecht's monologues and Holocaust poems. None of the postwar formalists compare with Merrill imo.

Fair enough. A recent favorite of mine has been August Kleinzahler. I came across one of his poems entitled "A History of Western Music" and never looked back. His memoir is really good too.

Okay, please to inform where to start with Merrill.

james merrill: c/d, s/d

just found this thread!

poems i've been reading a lot over the past couple of weeks:

paz - certainty
rilke - archaic torso of apollo
jarell - 90 north
wc williams - a love song
verlaine - clair de lune

elizabeth willis a bit, that nyrb poets volume
and wcw 'paterson' intermittently
and a touch of baudelaire

rilke - archaic torso of apollo
A favorite. I had a screen name based on it for a while that used when I started an ILB thread which is still on the ILB New Answers list.

it's quickly become a favorite of mine as well. i intend to make a post about it in a thread treeship started a month or so ago, after my exam tomorrow :o

also -- recently learned that WCW was a physician!

Wordsworth for the first time in two decades.

also -- recently learned that WCW was a physician!

i'm just always impressed when a physician is able to be world-class at something else. who has the time!

A good friend of mine had a theory that the kind of writing and thinking required by the legal profession made it very difficult to produce good prose

...whereas a medical career had no such side effect. Chekhov!

Although Voltaire was a lawyer. Haven't read anything long form by him though, just some quotable bon mots.

his prose is pretty... re-Volt-ing ;~P

He did write an epic poem intended to rival the Iliad and the Aeneid called La Henriade whilst imprisoned in the Bastille.

well what else are ya gonna do

charles wright's 'homage to paul cézanne' is wonderful. i liked how he described the process of writing it here:

I was doing a lot of looking at Cézanne’s paintings, and I’d been thinking about Cézanne a lot at that time. … I thought that certain painterly techniques – which is to say, using stanzas and lines the way painters sometimes use color and form – might be interesting. … So I worked on this poem not knowing how the poem was going to go. I thought it was going to be about ten sections. I knew it was going to be about Cézanne by the time I’d finished the first one. Not about Cézanne himself, but about the process of painting. I knew it was going to be nonlinear. I was going to write sections where each had to do with each other, but not consecutively or linearly. …

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/c_wright/homage.htm

does anyone else have southern cross? i guess cézanne is the opening poem, with a page devoted to each of its 8 sections, 16 lines each. southern cross is the closing poem, and i think i actually came across it a long time ago, but have forgotten it

Any recommendations for essential poetry/poets from like the Renaissance through the late 18th Century? Assuming I'm aware of the big names from the period in question (and I've been firmly entrenched in post-1770 lit for the last six months so I'm well sorted from there on).

Taking big names as Spenser, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope… then Skelton, enjoying Fulke Greville a lot at the moment… actually that reminds me - here's a list from the time thomp asked me to list my top 25 c17th poets
Michael Robbins - Alien Vs. Predator (nb this book of poems is not about aliens, predators or their conflicts)
Before that… I'll repeat John Skelton, Wyatt, the Scottish Makars (Robert Henryson in particular), Campion, Southwell maybe.
Always say that the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse is a great anthology.
After 1700 - Swift, Christopher Smart (stick to Jubilate Agno)… then I'm honestly a bit hesitant to recommend mid-late c18th stuff. It's a bit of an acquired or academic taste. I can read Collins, Gray etc, but they don't inspire me to proselytise. Things pick up with Cowper, but if you've been going in post-1770 you'll have run into him.

Wow, that is a far more expansive and helpful response than I could've hoped for. Thank you!

No prob!
And a postscript - that Michael Robbins thread reminded me he's just edited a selection of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's poetry for NYRB books. I should look at it - if I ever knew her verse, I've forgotten it, but The Blazing World is one of the great strange sort-of-novels of the c17th and she is fascinating.

John Hollander I'm reading now.

I've just discovered this thread. I like Hollander's criticism but I've not read his poetry. Where to begin?

I've been reading a bit of Les Murray and trying to ignore his more, ah, buffoonish commentary. Last Hellos is quite a thing.

With the LRB archive open (until the end of Jan, I think) I've been reading some of Helen Vendler's articles. This review of Motion's biography of Keats is scabrous and not entirely fair, I think: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n20/helen-vendler/inspiration-accident-genius

Loved this review of Hopkins' letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n07/helen-vendler/i-have-not-lived-up-to-it

Jay Wright.

Vendler taught me much about how to think about poetry, and I'm still fond of The Music of What Happens, but she's gotten idk hackish in recent years? She's old too, I suppose.

That review of Motion's biography was particularly, huffily critical of Motion's considerations of race, gender and class. It ponged of the anti-PC brigade.