Rolling Contemporary Poetry

"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.

Lineated prose isn't poetry, as much as Robbins and many others want it to be.

michael robbins sucks

his work just feels empty to me despite/because of how dense with reference it is. and when he employs rhyming like a guy who read john berryman once i want to saw my own head off

I like referential work but there's nothing sly or ambiguous about Robbins' work, which makes it really uninteresting to read.

But then again, I am an enormous hater of most popular contemporary poetry, so whatever.

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

I guess the title poem is free to read online, already five years old at this point, though I never read it, despite being at least a lukewarm Robbins fan:

https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6808/walkman-michael-robbins

It definitely is lineated prose, not sure it can't also be poetry though.

pretty much just reads like an essay to me

an essay i would abandon reading

Maybe the prosaic style is supposed to be a gesture of Marxist solidarity with populist Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur.

there’s a great part in lydia davis essays book where she talks about how non-lineated prose can be poetry and some lineated poetry is in fact prose and she says it’s highly subjective but then tries to explain it then gives a couples examples and it’s super spot on.

lol i totally remember that one

i mean my opinion is partially informed by how the guy had been a known asshole and idiot online in communities we were both a part of well before he became the pop music poetry guy

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, June 21, 2021 2:51 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have been trying to hold my tongue about him online for YEARS but I went to grad school with him and he was an asshole then for sure. I do not admire his poetry, but I can definitely not be objective.

There are plenty of contemporary poets who write about pop music, sometimes in a very prosaic manner, who are much better than Robbins. Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, Simone White, Moten. These poets are pushing boundaries of what content and form can do in terms of a poem's affective power...Robbins often reads like he's writing a somewhat pedestrian memoir...there's no surprise, no joy, and nothing interesting about his lines.

Like it shocks me that someone would give a fuck about Robbins if they could read Simone White's work about Future.

I thought Dan Chiasson made some astute comments about Joni Mitchell in The New Yorker, not always close to the way I hear her, but worth thinking about, unlike the presentations by many official music writers. Every other time I've seen him in there, he's written about about poetry, and has led me to good stuff.

Tough crowd. I liked the Robbins book. But admittedly I am in no way up to date as far as contemporary poetry goes.

I'm planning to get the book at some point.

Tbf, if it's published by a major publishing house, most poets are going to hate it. Robbins isn't for me, and that's fine.

(it's still bad poetry)

its p boring but i can't think its *bad poetry* and i'm not sure i get the lineated prose thing, seems less so than lots of stuff that has been called poetry for at least 50 years. the line breaks make sense to me as a metering device more than they often do in poems that i think are better or funnier or more insightful or feel stranger or

I would be interested if you could expand a bit on what you mean tbh table, i'm particularly surprised bc I'm sure I've seen you post positively about people like susan howe who i'm a big fan of and whose work is very agnostic about boundaries between poetry/prose/painting etc. I guess I'm just a bit confused because I don't suspect that you are operating from a conservative position, yet i can't see how otherwise to read this 'not-poetry' calling of poetry that is itself fairly conservative. I'm trying to imagine any analogue of this where I could go along with something being called 'not cinema' or 'not music'