Rolling Contemporary Poetry

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

Sad news about Les Murray.

Read 'Deaf Republic' by Ilya Kaminsky which I liked a lot.

anyone read
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1331/9925/products/witch_draft_cover_grande.png

I read it - I remember it reminded me of Cummings quite often.

https://readingintranslation.com/2019/06/01/its-a-wonderful-death-hilda-hilsts-of-death-minimal-odes-translated-from-portuguese-by-laura-cesarco-eglin/

Just ordered this:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/08/15/michael-hofmann-cold-comforts/

Sounds like he’s a big Robert Lowell fan, which is a good sign.

Was thinking it might be too late for summer reading, but the humidity is ba-a-a-ck (ghost of Dorian), so it's currently hotter than God's stuffed balls where I live, so I'll go ahead and post this:

Far Rockaway

"the cure of souls." Henry James

The radiant soda of the seashore fashions
Fun, foam, and freedom. The sea laves
The shaven sand. And the light sways forward
On the self-destroying waves.

The rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes
With business suits and the traffic's motion;
The lolling man lies with the passionate sun,
He returns to the children digging at summer,
A melon-like fruit.

O glittering and rocking and bursting and blue
--Eternities of sea and sky shadow no pleasure:
Time unheard moves and the heart of man is eaten
Consummately at leisure.

The novelist tangential on the boardwalk overhead
Seeks his cure of souls in his own anxious gaze.
"Here," he says, "With whom?" he asks, "This?" he questions,
"What tedium, what blaze?"

"What satisfaction, fruit? What transit, heaven?
Criminal, justified? Arrived at what June?"
That nervous conscience amidst the concessions
is a haunting, haunted moon.

---Delmore Schwartz

Hofmann has a very funny poem about Donald Trump in the current issue of the NY Review of Books.

https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product/new-hunger/?fbclid=IwAR1WLfTPNtRvqic2LDffBiSXZAJ5VPcWTj3IB0HdgQGWwVdIe8BWljGQ8ps

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Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 497
11 HOURS AGO

Big news announced this week, the upcoming (April 2021) CD release by Omnivore Recordings of Howl at Reed College (from February, 1956, the first recorded reading).
Variety in its announcement notes the background:

“The tape went forgotten until 2007, when author John Suiter found it in a box at Reed’s Hauser Memorial Library while doing research on another poet who read at the college that day, Gary Snyder. Its discovery made the news after being verified the following year. But it was to still go unheard to the general public until a Hollywood-Oregon connection made its release inevitable.

Reed named Dr. Audrey Bilger its president in 2019. Bilger happens to be married to Cheryl Pawelski, the Grammy-winning co-founder of Omnivore Recordings, who had moved to Oregon herself upon Bilger’s appointment. Omnivore already had history with Ginsberg, having released The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience in 2017 and The Last Word on First Blues in 2016. Using her existing connections with the Ginsberg estate, Pawelski sent the tape to Grammy Award-winning engineer Michael Graves to have it transferred, restored and mastered.”

Chris Lydgate in Reed Magazine tells more:

Its first public reading took place at San Francisco’s famous Six Gallery in October, 1955. Along with Ginsberg, the evening included readings by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poet Kenneth Rexroth was the emcee; Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neal Cassady were in the audience. Unfortunately, no one thought to record this historic moment. Ginsberg was recorded reading the poem at Berkeley a few months later in March, 1956, and for many years literary historians thought that recording was the first. But they were wrong. Earlier in 1956, Ginsberg and Snyder went hitchhiking through the Pacific Northwest, and arrived at Reed, where they decided to hold a poetry reading in the common room of the Anna Mann dormitory. On February 14, Ginsberg read the first section of “Howl,” still very much a work in progress. And this time, someone brought a tape recorder.”

John Suiter, also in Reed Magazine, back in 2008, provides the essential account:

“Before launching into “Howl” itself, Ginsberg pauses to briefly prime his listeners for what’s to come. “The line length,” he says. “You’ll notice that they’re all built on bop—You might think of them as built on a bop refrain—chorus after chorus after chorus—the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of ‘The Man I Love’ ’til everyone in the hall was out of his head—and Young was also . . .” (This was pure Kerouac, straight from the prefatory note to Mexico City Blues, wherein Kerouac states his notion of the poet as jazz saxophonist, “blowing” his poetic ideas in breath lines “from chorus to chorus.”)
(He) then begins with his now-famous opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . .”—delivered in a rather flat affect. First-time listeners may be surprised at how low-key Ginsberg sounds at the outset of this reading of “Howl,” though this was typical, and soon enough his voice rises to what he later called “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath.”
“I still hadn’t broken out of the classical Dylan Thomas monotone,” Ginsberg later wrote of his early readings. “—the divine machine revs up over and over until it takes off.”
The Reed recording of February 1956 is superb, faithful in pitch and superior in sound quality to any presently known 1950s version. Allen is miked closely, so his volume is even throughout. His enunciation is clear, his timing perfect; he never stumbles. His accent is classic North Jersey Jewish, intelligent and passionate. The poet-as-saxman metaphor comes demonstrably true as we hear Ginsberg drawing in great breaths at the anaphoric head of every line. It’s a recording to be breathed with as much as listened to…..”

links: https://allenginsberg.org/2021/01/f-j-15-2/

Roll on Omnivore---from my Uproxx ballot comments re: 2019:
Allen Ginsberg: The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience (Omnivore)

Baaahing at and from what no more can be seen from the darkening green, then venturing through rounds in the smokey city, letting the good and bad times constantly roll back and forth through each other, Blake and Ginsberg's magisterial and magical realness trespass is sometimes given pause and detour by evidence of a woman in there somewhere, as the wordmazes make way, even more---something to do with Ginsberg's choice of poems to include: no valentines, but some things that shake the darkness deeper, where Beatrice is unseen, also unsought, it seems. Eventually he meets Arthur Russell, who joins Bob Dylan etc. for nocturnes but hold on now when they meet, it's in a San Francisco park including a Buddhist troupe that AR is living with: here they keep rolling up and down though a thunderclap of drone.

Oops, that was originally from 2017, pasted into 2019 comments re Arthur Release.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Michael Robbins' new collection:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/156119/it-just-sort-of-happened

Alien vs Predator was a fun collection, but I like the excerpts of the longer poems that hint at a different direction here.