what poetry are you reading

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'.

All I know about Italian poetry is that Dante Alighieri is much better than Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Think of D'Annuzio as something people at a certain time read. Like I dunno Henry Miller or Keroauc.

Have read The Inferno since I finished all the Russian poetry. In the end The Penguin Book... is very uneven but Shamolov is so good, and if it means more of his poetry is translated then I'm all for it. Another find was Arseny Tarkovsky.

The other Russian poets who got similarly sized selections were Ivanov and Slutsky. Only a couple of Ivanov poems had a substantial charm to them for me to have another look.

There were 2-3 poets from the OBEIRU avant-garde group (whom Pussy Riot gave a nod to) and it just doesn't quite fit in this collection, which is part of the point as they don't want to fit in, but do the editors get that in their worries to be as historically comprehensive as possible?

Too many poets at the end had one single poem to them. Felt tired. Little chance of impact, and when there is any -- like in Yevgeny Vinokurov's "Missing the Troop Train" -- then, well, I am not going to get to anything else anytime soon, and its unlikely to be available anyway!

After Inferno I've stayed medieval w/Villon. Now finishing some poems by Gunter Grass.

Good article. Unfortunately subscriber-only:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/john-berryman-tragedy-comedy-together/

I bought Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients on a whim, and I love it. I know it was written to be read -- or really, performed -- but it works on the page, too. What she does seems kind of obvious but would be easy to do badly.

Yeah, I want to read her poetry and plays. Was immediately impressed by her use of language on Everybody Down, the delivery and writing: conversational and seemingly spontaneous, but lucid zoom-shot phrases in the midst of tumultous grey scenes, Went a bit convenient and otherwise soft toward the end, but that's about the plot choices, not the language(or music). (h'm-m-m, it's gonna be a novel too). She's got charisma.

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.