what poetry are you reading

damn, that Empson essay. Really was thinking that it was pretty clear-headed for late Empson – a bit closer to the shore than a lot of his speculative jaunts. Then he gets into interpreting Faustus at the end and:

A play needs a plot, and Marlowe made Faust try to escape Hell by becoming a Middle Spirit; he bought the help of Mephistophelis, who was a Middle Spirit, not a devil, by promising him his immortal soul. Neither of them dare say this because the Devil would overhear, but the Chorus to Act Two, which is mysteriously missing, explained what they are hinting at; a Chorus was needed because the Devil could not overhear it. By the end of Act Two Faust is already certain that he has been cheated, and is damned; he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors; but after his terrible final speech denouncing Hell he cries ‘Ah, Mephistophelis’, and dies in his friend’s arms with ecstasy, finding that his plan has worked after all.

it makes me want to reread Faustus, even though it is a bizarre reading.

ha ha, i love empson's bizarre readings - allowing interpretations based on propositions withheld as a dramatisation of a fear of being heard by the Devil is a particular good'un.

and thanks one way street - now you mention it i think remembering seeing it, but would have forgotten otherwise. and yes - next step is to get the German originals of my favourites in the volume so far.

he takes to horse-play to stave off his terrors

new board description?

i mean I say 'close to the shore' for that Empson essay, but tbh I was thinking "I am troubled by this in various ways but will let it go FOR NOW" when he was giving his explanation of changelings:

To discover that your baby is a moron is a slow, painful process, and the men cannot feel it decent to interfere with any palliation for the mother such as letting her be told that her real child is being much appreciated among the fairies. The trouble is that it has lost its chance of Heaven, but it will live unusually long. This comfort was often enough. It made baby-watching a very responsible business, and probably increased the unhealthy shutting of windows, because the fairies flew in there, but to speak against it would be callous. If the baby had been stolen by devils, that would be horrible, and there could be no connivance in the belief.

not poetry per se but i picked up berryman's out of print novel 'recovery,' his thinly-veiled unfinished autobio about AA-in-the-clinic. its a very unflattering but thoughtfully drawn self portrait imo, shouldn't be OOP even if it is unfinished.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

just picked up 'our andromeda' too, looking forward to it.

i got looks reading it at the bar.

how ugly were they

ha it was all the regulars so they thought it was pretty funny actually, got a story out of the bartender about how "we don't use styrofoam cups at the water cooler here anymore because people kept saying it reminded them of the meeting they were skipping"

I've been reading more of Ingeborg Bachmann, and going slowly through Jorie Graham's selected poems, many of which leave me slightly cold despite her obvious intelligence and ability to sustain a tone of high seriousness. I think I might be more receptive to individual books of her poetry (so far I'm most impressed with her work from Erosion), since her methods seem to vary distinctly from book to book. I'm also reading Jackqueline Frost's 2013 book, The Antidote, which is a dense and oblique (occasionally prolix) but spirited commentary on the conditions of the Oakland Commune, and which does interesting things with the communizing potential of Franciscan poverty, and with Hegel's reading of gender in the Oresteia (as far as I can tell). (For the sake of transparency, I should mention that I consider Jack a friend.)

Think of torches and thirst. If there is no spirit for youth, and we have given up that gallery of ghosts. But GIVEN AGAINST, this is the antidote. I took it there, that night. As before, I was medicating with something like music. As before, I kept my monastery and lived on the lithe ancestry of words I came close to understanding.

All sunless gestures will remain oblique. I remain called in the calling to which I am called, knowing what a curse is, insulated by others, as secrecy among us is choral.

How then to dérive. To point to the beginning because of forgetting and returning. Beginning because we wish to adopt movement outside of narrative. To see crisis not as a great hill that comes into relief against the depth of a valley, but as the voltaic atmosphere and eccentricity of fog.

heavens me, i should look into that frost book

did you ever read 'the hole', hoos? have i already asked you that?

I've learned that with Graham, Rich, and Gluck I prefer their early work, years before they broke the vessels, as it were: the tension between their embryonic selves and what I know they'll become fascinates me. I'm reading Gluck's The House on Marshland fer instance.

I am not much of a poetry fan, but have random impromptu-ly enjoyed hearing Edward Field and Patricia Spears Jones read in the past two months

did you ever read 'the hole', hoos? have i already asked you that?

― j., Tuesday, February 3, 2015 2:45 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think you have asked me that and i have not read it but i will check it out

who is it that wrote it

I've learned that with Graham, Rich, and Gluck I prefer their early work, years before they broke the vessels, as it were: the tension between their embryonic selves and what I know they'll become fascinates me. I'm reading Gluck's The House on Marshland fer instance.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 3, 2015 2:48 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still haven't read much graham but i feel this entirely on rich and gluck both--*descending figure* has become one of my favorite things around

its sort of the height of powers, right, the moment where a writer is full of beans and confidently striding forward but not yet cruising amiably on momentum

oh um

not to be crass but i have a chapbook out as of today

which is some poetry you can be reading http://hoosteen.net/soft-asylum

Congratulations, HOOS!

hoos - http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780982212073/the-hole.aspx?rf=1
thought i read some stuff that made some LA-area OWS connections re it, but don't see them on the book page proper atm, so unsure

thx one way

j i will totally take a peek at that. noticing in the descrip

think of certain movements of Zukofsky's "A" for example or Williams's Paterson

both of which seem to be popping up as v hip crushes lately

PATERSON IS ALWAYS A HIP CRUSH

well done hooz

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!)