what poetry are you reading

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.

I've been reading Michael Hofmann's One Lark, One Horse, and also started Rabindranath Tagore's Collected Poems and Plays.

Late Air by Elizabeth Bishop

From a magician’s midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.
And like a fortune-teller’s
their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.

But on the Navy Yard aerial I find
better witnesses
for love on summer nights.
Five remote red lights
keep their nests there; Phoenixes
burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.

I keep thinking about this. I have a mental image of it, which has little to do with the concrete language - something closer to a feeling of late summer. My associative impulse is to relate it to Skunk Hour but there is no sense of psychosis here. And, looking now at the particulars, there's something occult in the references - the magician, the fortune teller, the phoenixes - and, ultimately a hopefulness. Am I parsing that right? I keep staring at the enjambment after fortune teller's, wanting there to be noun in the blankness.

But on the Navy Yard aerial I find
better witnesses
for love on summer nights.

Perfect enjambment

See, I can say that I instinctively agree with you without really being able to - technically - say why that's perfect enjambment.

I've been reading Seamus Heaney's Death of A Naturalist. After reading so much Auden it's both surprisingly prescriptive and, I don't know, loose and roomy - within the space of the lines, at least. As an origin story, it's made me think of the episode of Wordsworth nicking the boat in the Prelude and losing his close ties to mother nature forever, albeit Heaney's loss of nature is much more closely tied to his father and the tradition he was born into (and is partly about the mourning of its loss). There's also something of Eliot's renouncing of Romanticism in there: a really studied look into the eyes of nature in tooth and claw.

Heaney might be line by line one of my favorite poets of the last sixty years. The brevity of his verse has a music I swoon to.

^^ Speaking of music, you should really try and watch the documentary The Music of What Happens (review here) which is brilliant. A touching portrait by the people who were close to and loved him (including students of his in America) and about the music of his verses, in a way.

I missed it when it was on the iPlayer in the UK; now it's in that frustrating declivity between release and DVD etc.

Would you recommend any other particular volumes of Heaney's poetry? I have a Selected (and Finders Keepers) but it's dawning on me (I have to learn the simple things last) that individual collections are absolutely the way to go.

This is the good poetry:

Alice Oswald (megaphone visible) supporting striking students. Very proud to have her as our Professor of Poetry. pic.twitter.com/YQUfin3YW9

— Merve Emre (@mervatim) March 5, 2020