Rolling Contemporary Poetry

Does anyone have anything to say about Akashic Press's Black Goat imprint? I've been a little intrigued with it since finding out about it. It looks like it's slowed down though so maybe nobody has been biting.

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog-tag/black-goat/

xps

Being a careful, respectful and understanding reader never requires you to like what you find. These days I find that even the best poetry I read seldom excites me as it did when I was younger, but the best still engages me and gives me worthwhile satisfaction.

If you haven't already perused the many threads where ilxors have posted their own poetry, you really ought to. The results are not overly concerned with theory, reputation-making, or critical approval, and so are rather refreshing. You might like a good 3%!

On the anniversary of the birth of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), poet Marilyn Hacker shares a new translation:

The Second Olive Tree

By Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree
Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow
Covers her one leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.
Standing, she is seated, and seated, standing.
She lives as a friendly sister of eternity, neighbor of time
That helps her stock her luminous oil and
Forget the invaders’ names, except the Romans, who
Coexisted with her, and borrowed some of her branches
To weave wreaths. They did not treat her as a prisoner of war
But as a venerable grandmother, before whose calm dignity
Swords shatter. In her reticent silver-green
Color hesitates to say what it thinks, and to look at what is behind
The portrait, for the olive tree is neither green nor silver.
The olive tree is the color of peace, if peace needed
A color. No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!
But: How noble and how splendid! And she,
She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles
And re-educates them in tenderness and humility: Go home
And light your lamps with my oil! But
These soldiers, these modern soldiers
Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage
Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,
Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky.
She did not weep or cry out. But one of her grandsons
Who witnessed the execution threw a stone
At a soldier, and he was martyred with her.
After the victorious soldiers
Had gone on their way, we buried him there, in that deep
Pit – the grandmother’s cradle. And that is why we were
Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive
Tree – a thorny olive tree – and green!

Derek Walcott

With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings,

midsummer’s leaves race to extinction like the roar

of a Brixton riot tunneled by water hoses;

they seethe towards autumn’s fire—it is in their nature,

5 being men as well as leaves, to die for the sun.

The leaf stems tug at their chains, the branches bending

like Boer cattle under Tory whips that drag every wagon

nearer to apartheid. And, for me, that closes

the child’s fairy tale of an antic England—fairy rings,

10 thatched cottages fenced with dog roses,

a green gale lifting the hair of Warwickshire.

I was there to add some color to the British theater.

“But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare, they have no experience.”

This was true. Their thick skulls bled with rancor

15 when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips

you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,

and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,

while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire

20 that began with Caedmon’s raceless dew, and is ending

in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s ships

Ha -- was gonna post that I'm rereading The Bounty.

I've been enjoying the Szymborska collection I've been reading. She got good pretty early on (by her early 30s at least) and stayed very good for a long period of time. I feel like that's one award the Nobel committee got right.

^^^

Especially her death poems

Derek Walcott

New Frederick Seidel poem this week:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/03/21/now/

Started reading Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Preistdaddy.

FOGLAND

In winter my lover thrives
among the forest creatures.
The laughing fox knows I must return
before morning.
How the clouds tremble! And a layer
of broken ice falls on me
from the snow craters.

In winter my lover
is a tree among trees inviting
the melancholic crows
to its lovely branches. She knows
that at dusk, the wind will raise
her stiff adorned evening gown
and chase me home.

In winter my lover
swims mute among the fish.
On the bank, I stand in thrall to waters,
caressed from within
by the stroke of her fins.
I watch as she dips and turns,
till banished by the floes.

And warned once more by the shriek
of the bird that arcs stiffly
above, I head for the open field: there
she plucks the hens bald,
throws me a white collarbone.
I wield it to my throat,
make my way through the scattered plumage.

A faithless lover, as well I know,
at times she sweeps into town
in her high-heels,
she parades herself in bars, the straw
from her glass deep in her mouth,
the mot juste tripping from her lips.
I do not understand this language.

I have seen fog-land,
I have eaten the smoke-screened heart.

-- Ingeborg Bachmann

Finished both of Patricia Lockwood’s poetry books & her memoir.

How were they?

That was to ghost of markers above. Anyone found anything else good?

lockwood's poetry doesn't really do much for me but i found her memoir to be pretty good. it's often hilarious (obv.) and touching. i thought the chapter on music was particularly good

her poetry is pretty prose-ey (prosaic but without the negative connotation) tbh

100+ free PDF poetry chapbooks "celebrating" 100+ days of Trump awfulness: http://www.moriapoetry.com/locofo.html

(Haven't read any of them yet, but surely worth a look)

are all the chapbooks about trump

inspired by the america of his first 100 days, but not necessarily about _him_ per se

Some very choice stuff to be had here:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/the-magic-of-limestone-country/

‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’

From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the slightest chance connection. While her neighbours in Coleshill go about their spongy, fossil-filled environment with nary a thought of ‘chthonic forces’, Sampson inhabits a half-soluble landscape of subterranean streams and geopathic stress created by the compacted shells and skeletons of primeval sea-creatures.

A professor of poetry and champion of creative writing as a therapeutic tool, Sampson fortunately finds other people as interesting as herself. This ‘personal exploration’ of the ways in which a mind interacts with a landscape might have been a gallery of psycho-geographical selfies in picturesque settings; which, to some extent, it is. She relives an early love affair with a chain-smoking Macedonian in the ‘intractable, dense and mysterious’ Slovenian Karst and ...

jeez---contemporary enough, still: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

Saddened to find out that Tom Raworth passed away last February.

"Anxiety is just another form of entertainment." NEA Presents: Frank O'Hara reading his poetry,writing some more while talking on the phone and being filmed, also discussing his multimedia collabs, in progrss (shortly before his death). Ed Sanders reads his poetry in his Peace Eye Bookstore (a bunch of other poets on this same page)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89pOmcTVbTY

This happened (and the Guardian editorialised it terribly), what do you lot think

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/poetry-world-split-over-polemic-attacking-amateur-work-by-young-female-poets

Well, it's... not black and white. I think this debate playing out as it is, is something to be welcomed and is right on time. I can go a long way with Watts:

"Watts attacks the “cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’"

'Honesty' and 'accessibility' have never been things that attracted me in poetry. Honesty and accessibility is what I look for in an automobile mechanic, not poetry. One can easily argue both are 'enemies' of poetry. What's good poetry without a secret, without having to overcome at least some obstacle, without running your head into its wall, without dirt or ugliness, to ultimately come to a revelation or enjoyment or?

Also, honesty and accessibility is goddamn tiring. *Everything* is honest and accessible nowadays. It's all available, shared within a second. This was already uninteresting when Seneca wrote poetry, let alone today w/ instagram etc.

So if the quoted “you should see me / when my heart is broken / i don’t grieve / i shatter” is exemplary, yeah, pass the Dutchie the left hand side man, it's not for me.

But... All that doesn't mean it's not poetry, or shouldn't be called poetry, or shouldn't be lauded, shouldn't be praised. It's not that it's not poetry; it is. It's that it's bad poetry is what deserves critique imo. Everyone has the right to write (or love) bad poetry. We've all done it. Every single one of us is guilty of doing that. Loving bad shit.

Tl;dr:

Saying it's not poetry: bad
Saying it's bad poetry: yes

When I was young, 'young adult fiction', as an advertised literary genre did not exist. And thank god for that. As a young adult the last thing I'd do is walk to the 'young adult fiction' section in the book store. "The fuck is this shit?! You are *marketing* stuff from a boring 30-something to be thee best stuff for me? Off to the gulag with you ffs!" You'd want a rebel, a dark, dissonant voice. Rimbaud for one, who was a young adult all of his writing days, but didn't write like one and sure as hell took care he wasn't advertised as such.

But since poetry now can also be some words framed into a teal/orange square instagram picture, I don't see why we shouldn't call that poetry. The value lies in what the readers derive from it. But it can, and should, still be called out for being bad poetry if it is.

Part of me really, really liked seeing a full-on critical takedown of this type of poetry; and part of me watched and disapproved of that liking.

I unashamedly liked the bit in the article where Watts catches Don Paterson changing his critical tune for convenience (he'd previously argued against the things he praises in McNish).

It's interesting getting yr copy of a magazine in the post, reading through it, thinking ah yeah that's a take I've not seen before, and moving on - then watch the same article blow up across social media but framed very differently.

Part of me really, really liked seeing a full-on critical takedown of this type of poetry; and part of me watched and disapproved of that liking.

You could've spared me a couple of minutes had you posted this before me tbh. I feel myself inching towards this stance in a lot of these debates. Not necessarily to or fro a certain position, more like seeing the discourse for what it is in the rearviewmirror and driving off, seeing it shrink and shrink...

Yeah. I mean I've seen a lot of facebook commentary to the effect of, 'shock horror, Watts is being ridiculously harsh on these young poets' - rather as if people are not so much defending Mcnish and Kaur qua poetry, but are rather aghast that Watts would break the politeness code. She does come across as harsh but I can as you say see her side of it and the other.

Now the other side of it (this post got very long, congrats to anyone who reads to end), the thing I thought Watts left unsaid was: yeah so you've got the sort of performance poets who turn up at every open-mic night in the land, and rant, go on for too long, jokes fall flat, tone is off, wouldn't it be better if they read a few more books and did some editing, and tried to write poetry that did something instead of said something for once.

You've got that for sure, and it's not very good; I'm glad Watts has set about criticising that, and the bit of Mcnish that's like that; but you've also got the 'plausible poetry' written by, like, well to stitch a stereotype together, people who did a creative writing course and now run a yearly writer's retreat and are published by Faber.

Certainly some study of poetry, some 'craft', and of course editing, has gone into it, but not very intensively; the imaginative blinkers are still on, it still avoids the risks inherent in trying to write like Rimbaud or trying to write a sonnet or adopting a Yeatsian tone, all of which if you do you have a high chance of failing outright and a slim chance of genuinely opening a new door. Avoid these risks, and you pass. Maybe you wouldn't pass with Watts actually, but in general this is how contemporary poetry goes.

And this plausible poetry is everywhere, well not everywhere, but makes up a large chunk of the poetry currently published in Britain. It's understandable that someone - especially a younger person - would take one look at it and fuck it off entirely in favour of doing some performance poetry at a festival, which I suppose is probably an awesome experience, with tangible rewards - backslaps and cheers from pissed people who don't normally like poetry are going to be more fun than a series of rejection letters.

I guess I think Watts could have cracked the ghost of a smile and shown a bit of understanding of that side of it; an awareness that it's all well and good talking about literary standards but er, what that often translates to in real life is a very very boring poem with an italicised quote from Martin Luther at the beginning, about the author's holiday to somewhere cultural. Or indeed a book about limestone, see upthread.

Yeah, def some poetry is too safe. Some can work almost equally well in performance or on the page. Usually not the deepest poetry, but Blake is an exception, judging for instance by most of Allen Ginsberg's The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience, finally all together in the 2017 edition. I don't find Whitman as powerful---he can oversell---but Fred Hersh's shrewd settings of Leaves of Grass for singers does hold my attention, and he's another influence on Ginsberg, some of whose own writing works both ways, projecting or at least selling honesty successfully, and certainly he favors direct address: " Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb, I don't feel good don't bother me." I'll still take that over a lot of Frank O'Hara.

"Deepest" aside, sometimes it works better when the audience has time to stop and think, linger on a word or line, re-read whatever you please. So I'm trying to cut back on NPR.

Joan Murray, re-re-rediscovered, new to me----gonna have to get this collection (I don't agree with every single one of his comments on this first poem, for instance, but as in all the DC pieces I've seen, he presents things with room for other views)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/joan-murrays-enduring-poetry-of-the-senses

local bookstore had more rh sin books than any other poet and ugh: https://www.instagram.com/r.h.sin/

https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/entertainment/2018/10/21/news/carol-ann-duffy-pens-poem-to-mark-centenary-of-armistice-day-1464820/

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.

Thanks to these 'tides' which also 'chant', I am now convinced that war is bad.

Poem seems to be stuck between two ideas: war as a mistake morally significant because it could be avoided, and war as an endless problem, rather like the sea, about which nothing can be done. Really these seem like contrary postures.

The century is a tide, which is chanting the psalms, and also a book, with pages, and it is also wounded. The sort of heavy mixed metaphor that brooks no argument, you have to take it or leave it.

Also the statement 'we learn nothing' is a bit questionable. I for one have been to look at several preserved battleships and even read one or two books about wars. Which is a deliberate misreading of what she means, but still.

If history is 'chastising' these shores, that is Britain specifically, for starting wars, we might ask whether it is also chastising the shores of Germany and Japan, and if not, why not?

The only specific real picture we get is of, presumably, British tommies boarding boats, and that's it, and even then they're singing with the bravery of belief. No names or descriptions, or place names.

At least we now know that God has ended, so we're one up on whatever stupid religious naivete those people might have maintained before and after the war.

I find that the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg does rather more than 'gargle its own blood'.

Unrelated - I thought I'd check in with difficult Cambridge poets, see what Simon Jarvis has been up to for the last couple of years and yikes.

xp History as an ocean makes some some sense.

Writing poetry to mark formal and solemn occasions is a tricky business and most poets of this age have no practice at it and never developed any talent they may have had in that direction. Carol Ann Duffy has caught a bit of the heavy music, but her meanings stumble against her ideas like drunks in the dark.

Incidentally, Hopkins fits the classic paedophile profile but I dislike him because I don't think he's any good.

can one fp a whole blog

Xp that is very bad news re: Jarvis. I dunno how to go about running 'good poetry, bad man' on someone who's done something that bad.

Elsewhere has anyone read penguin New poets series (their new one). Tried to encounter a few in waterstone's last time I was in, but did not like

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/22/is-contemporary-poetry-really-in-a-rotten-state-or-just-a-new-one

Novelist Rose Tremain thinks poetry these days is overrated. “Let’s dare to say it out loud: contemporary poetry is in a rotten state,” she told the TLS this week. “Having binned all the rules, most poets seem to think that rolling out some pastry-coloured prose, adding a sprinkling of white space, then cutting it up into little shapelets will do. I’m fervently hoping for something better soon.”

Had Tremain really managed to miss the whole of modernism? After all, the modernists swore they had “binned all the rules” at or around the end of the 19th century. For anyone, much less a writer, 20th-century modernist poets are hard to miss; whether it is the sediments of Eliot or Pound, or the brilliant treasures of HD, Mina Loy or Hope Mirrlees. Had Tremain leapt over the cross-currents of the next 100 years from Tennyson to Walter de la Mare to Philip Larkin, flat-footing it on their bald, smooth verse to land on some plaintive lyrical bank of our new century?

ts eliot and ezra pound not contemporary poetry

Xp

I'm not sure which is worse: 'they have broken the rules' or 'modernism means you can't ask for poetry based on rules' or 'because of Eliot and Pound, contemporary poetry need not answer to any standard'.

The Outside Scoop

Another xp

I h8 the way those two get brought in to justify free verse; Eliot tends to have trimeter, tetrameter and alexandrines going on; Pound began with strict formal verse, moving on to a new style for the cantons, and praised good examples of it throughout his essays