what poetry are you reading

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

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.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski),

North and Field Work, although his selected poems volume is among my most thumbed collections.

Thanks, Alfred.

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

This feels like relatively minor Heaney but damn: that subject-less opening line, where the vastness of the docker's object-hood seems to obliterate everything else; the granitic
weight of the nouns and adjectives in the descriptions: cowling-plated, crossbeam, sledgehead; and the not-so-subtle emergence of the social and religious context*; the beautiful metaphor of the scurf of his pint resembling a priest's collar.

*it's a slow creep through the book as a whole, but here, in the figure of the docker, it walks right out in front of you and pokes you in the chest.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair

These lines!

Just spent 15 minutes typing "Lisburn Road" into the browser, only to have it vanish, but here it is anyway, a happy marriage of style and subject matter:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/lisburn-road

I’m not sure looking at working class people in the pub and stereotyping what they might be thinking is a good starting-point for poetry

that re the Heaney above rather than ‘Lisburn Road’. I have hated Heaney since the one on a poster in my English classroom at age, what, fourteen? which still comes back at intervals and works me into an apoplexy. The one that ends ‘I’ll dig with it.’

what do yall think of denise riley? reading through the nyrb reissue of 'say something back' and 'time lived without its flow' and finding them pretty great. the sense of humor, though not much else, reminds me of rosmarie waldrop a little.

Does the fact that Heaney *was* working class people make a difference here? Plus I'm not sure that's what he's doing in that particular poem, at least not only that. There are awe and respect in there too.

That line is from 'Digging' and is a bit on the nose. It's practically juvenalia though and serves him well enough as a youthful manifesto.

I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop's first two volumes - North and South and A Cold Spring. I've struggled with finding a unifying voice in them and need to re-read with a clearer mind, but there are so many stunning poems: Late Air, the Man-Moth, At the Fishhouses, The Fish, Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.

i have nothing not mean spirited to say about heaney so will avoid further comment

what's the best ashbery for a beginner? i've read lots of standalone poems and am finishing up tennis court oath but want to know what the usual entry points are.

Don’t know if it’s the usual circuit but Chinese Whispers eased me into his late style. Then I dipped backwards into Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

When I asked Alfred on ILB, he rec. Houseboat Days, but I haven't tried it yet. Mostly know him as a critic: v. astute observations here , which became the intro to Once and For All, ace Delmore Schwartz comp. The Lowell poem about Delmore, which Ashbery ends with, got me into Frank BIdart's monster RL collection: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-heavy-bear-on-delmore-schwartz

Any of those mid seventies collections will do: The Double Dream of Spring, Self-Portrait..., Houseboat Days. I'm partial to As We Know and A Wave. But, really, after 1974 a distressing sameness creeps into the work common to poets who finesse their manner.