what poetry are you reading

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.

This 1997 poem is my favorite late Ashbery lyric. It's called "Wakefulness."

Wakefulness

An immodest little white wine, some scattered seraphs,
recollections of the Fall—tell me,
has anyone made a spongier representation, chased
fewer demons out of the parking lot
where we all held hands?

Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.
I was touched by your care,
reduced to fawning excuses.
Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire,
the clock ticked on and on, happy about
being apprenticed to eternity. A gavotte of dust motes
came to replace my seeing. Everything was as though
it had happened long ago
in ancient peach-colored funny papers
wherein the law of true opposites was ordained
casually. Then the book opened by itself
and read to us: “You pack of liars,
of course tempted by the crossroads, but I like each
and every one of you with a peculiar sapphire intensity.
Look, here is where I failed at first.
The client leaves. History natters on,
rolling distractedly on these shores. Each day, dawn
condenses like a very large star, bakes no bread,
shoes the faithless. How convenient if it’s a dream.”

In the next sleep car was madness.
An urgent languor installed itself
as far as the cabbage-hemmed horizons. And if I put a little
bit of myself in this time, stoppered the liquor that is our selves’
truant exchanges, brandished my intentions
for once? But only I get
something out of this memory.
A kindly gnome
of fear perched on my dashboard once, but we had all
been instructed
to ignore the conditions of the chase. Here, it
seems to grow lighter with each passing century. No matter
how you twist it,
life stays frozen in the headlights.
Funny, none of us heard the roar

Wowwww, thanks!

getting around to the small contingent of recent poetry books on my shelf: francine j. harris's play dead last week, this week ruth ellen kocher's third voice. it's a weird one. it contextualises itself with quotations from minstrel-show how-to texts every so often; various famous figures of black american history have imagined encounters; a narratorial persona has anxieties. this last is (via the minstrel show bit, i guess) meant to be somehow riffing on the eliotic 'third voice' which i know nothing about. it's all formatted like this:

Skit: Pearl Bailey and Eartha Kitt Revise Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful

Whether we love it or hate it is irrelevant to its worth. We have
heard more women call women whores than we have heard men
call women whores. We have more light than we know what to do
with. Live with it. Some time ago, a Woman asked us for five
women we loved and five women we hated and five women we
hated to love . . . or maybe five women we hated and five women
we loved and five women we loved to hate . . . or both. We haven’t
been able to answer. We’re trying not to sing too easy green and
violet veins meaning moth-winged flower or would it be worse to
say bloom? The shackled hardwood, the ribs of the house, the ribs
of a huge beast, the ribs of a fossil, the ribs of a thing destined to
be stone. We call ourselves Away. Stranded is a place not a thing

(n.b. i tried to read this before last year and gave up because a lot of the poems are single long verse-paragraphs like that but the typesetting leaves two or three lines on the verso of the page and it drove me insane)

First impression is of going for/with hard statements of/as facts/home truths, illuminations, not reductions, casting toward "shackled hardwood" and so on---"we" unity too restless vibrant jittery to be "I" for a while.

This is a good tweet.

At the last we want
unit costs plus VAT, patient grading:
made to order, made to care, poised
at the nub of avid sugar soap.

-- J.H. Prynne, The Oval Window (1983) pic.twitter.com/hLsX6fIOmk

— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) April 16, 2020

is it tho

i lazily copied the kocher poem above from elsewhere on the internet and gosh, i just realised they've re-punctuated it

A lot of tweets are good not bad imo.

sure but in the hierarchy of things tweeted is that really one of the better ones

It's got potential in that I nearly picked up my J.H. Prynne's Poems to read the whole thing.

yeah i went to google books, my collected prynne is in another country. i'm not sure what point jnt thinks he's making with it but i don't think it stands up to much inspection

I read this and a few others by him last night. It's from circa 1934. He chose not to divide it into stanzas:

Valediction by Louis MacNeice

Their verdure dare not show . . . their verdure dare not show . . .
Cant and randy — the seals’ heads bobbing in the tide-flow
Between the islands, sleek and black and irrelevant
They cannot depose logically what they want:
Died by gunshot under borrowed pennons,
Sniped from the wet gorse and taken by the limp fins
And slung like a dead seal in a boghole, beaten up
By peasants with long lips and the whisky-drinker’s cough.
Park your car in the city of Dublin, see Sackville Street
Without the sandbags in the old photos, meet
The statues of the patriots, history never dies,
At any rate in Ireland, arson and murder are legacies
Like old rings hollow-eyed without their stones,
Dumb talismans.
See Belfast, devout and profane and hard,
Built on reclaimed mud, hammers playing in the shipyard,
Time punched with holes like a steel sheet, time
Hardening the faces, veneering with a grey and speckled rime
The faces under the shawls and caps:
This was my mother-city, these my paps.
Country of callous lava cooled to stone,
Of minute sodden haycocks, of ship-sirens’ moan,
Of falling intonations — I would call you to book
I would say to you, Look;
I would say, This is what you have given me
Indifference and sentimentality
A metallic giggle, a fumbling hand,
A heart that leaps to a fife band:
Set these against your water-shafted air
Of amethyst and moonstone, the horses’ feet like bells of hair
Shambling beneath the orange cart, the beer-brown spring
Guzzling between the heather, the green gush of Irish spring.
Cursed be he that curses his mother. I cannot be
Anyone else than what this land engendered me:
In the back of my mind are snips of white, the sails
Of the Lough’s fishing-boats, the bellropes lash their tails
When I would peal my thoughts, the bells pull free —
Memory in apostasy.
I would tot up my factors
But who can stand in the way of his soul’s steam-tractors?
I can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland is
A gallery of fake tapestries,
But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,
The woven figure cannot undo its thread.
On a cardboard lid I saw when I was four
Was the trade-mark of a hound and a round tower,
And that was Irish glamour, and in the cemetery
Sham Celtic crosses claimed our individuality,
And my father talked about the West where years back
He played hurley on the sands with a stick of wrack.
Park your car in Killarney, buy a souvenir
Of green marble or black bog-oak, run up to Clare,
Climb the cliff in the postcard, visit Galway city,
Romanticise on our Spanish blood, leave ten per cent of pity
Under your plate for the emigrant,
Take credit for our sanctity, our heroism and our sterile want
Columba Kevin and briny Brendan the accepted names,
Wolfe Tone and Grattan and Michael Collins the accepted names,
Admire the suavity with which the architect
Is rebuilding the burnt mansion, recollect
The palmy days of the Horse Show, swank your fill,
But take the Holyhead boat before you pay the bill;
Before you face the consequence
Of inbred soul and climatic maleficence
And pay for the trick beauty of a prism
In drug-dull fatalism.
I will exorcise my blood
And not to have my baby-clothes my shroud
I will acquire an attitude not yours
And become as one of your holiday visitors,
And however often I may come
Farewell, my country, and in perpetuum;
Whatever desire I catch when your wind scours my face
I will take home and put in a glass case
And merely look on
At each new fantasy of badge and gun.
Frost will not touch the hedge of fuchsias,
The land will remain as it was,
But no abiding content can grow out of these minds
Fuddled with blood, always caught by blinds;
The eels go up the Shannon over the great dam;
You cannot change a response by giving it a new name.
Fountain of green and blue curling in the wind
I must go east and stay, not looking behind,
Not knowing on which day the mist is blanket-thick
Nor when sun quilts the valley and quick
Winging shadows of white clouds pass
Over the long hills like a fiddler’s phrase.
If I were a dog of sunlight I would bound
From Phoenix Park to Achill Sound,
Picking up the scent of a hundred fugitives
That have broken the mesh of ordinary lives,
But being ordinary too I must in course discuss
What we mean to Ireland or Ireland to us;
I have to observe milestone and curio
The beaten buried gold of an old king’s bravado,
Falsetto antiquities, I have to gesture,
Take part in, or renounce, each imposture;
Therefore I resign, good-bye the chequered and the quiet hills,
The gaudily-striped Atlantic, the linen-mills
That swallow the shawled file, the black moor where half
A turf-stack stands like a ruined cenotaph;
Good-bye your hens running in and out of the white house
Your absent-minded goats along the road, your black cows
Your greyhounds and your hunters beautifully bred
Your drums and your dolled-up virgins and your ignorant dead.

I'm trying to read John Ashbery's Houseboat Days and am intrigued enough to stick around but he doesn't give you much, does he? I like the idea of writing *alongside* meaning and trying to follow the logic of music but it's frustrating and knotty. First noticing: he's opaque with pronouns, which I love; time is everywhere, and passing quickly; there's a Jamesian complexity to his sentences (clause, meet clause); he can stop me dead: '‘The omnipresent possibility of being interrupted/While what I stand for is still almost a bare canvas’ or

You turned your face fully toward night,
Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing
Or caring, although these still live and are generous
And are all ways contained, allowed to come and go
Indefinitely in and out of the stockade
They have so much trouble remembering, when your
forgetting
Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.

I love "The Wrong Kind of Insurance."

Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes
Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,
And the funny thing is it knows we know
About it and still wants us to go on believing
In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants
To be loved not for that but for itself:
The murky atmosphere of a park, tattered
Foliage, wise old treetrunks, rainbow tissue-paper wadded
Clouds down near where the perspective
Intersects the sunset, so we may know
We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many different things,
Too many to make sense to anybody.
We straggle on as quotients, hard-to-combine
Ingredients, and what continues
Does so with our participation and consent.

Try milk of tears, but it is not the same.
The dandelions will have to know why, and your comic
Dirge routine will be lost on the unfolding sheaves
Of the wind, a lucky one, though it will carry you
Too far, to some manageable, cold, open
Shore of sorrows you expected to reach,
Then leave behind.
Thus, friend, this distilled,
Dispersed musk of moving around, the product
Of leaf after transparent leaf, of too many
Comings and goings, visitors at all hours.
Each night
Is trifoliate, strange to the touch.

He's got my number

Yeah, this is magnificent, and 'The message is learned/The way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned' could well function as a manifesto from what I've read so far.

I finally read Leaving the Atocha Station. I didn't love it exactly (I don't know that I needed a novel about a writer's struggle for meaning, couched in ironic distance) but the Ashbery section, that functioned as the centrepiece-as-enacted-criticism, damn well nearly *did* make me fall head-over-heels with it. I've read excerpts of The Hatred of Poetry and think I should read it.

'centrepiece-as-enacted-criticism' already makes me want to punch myself in the eye, but it was the best I had for how that bit of buried criticism functioned as a codebreaker for the whole text. I wonder if a stricter editor might have got rid of it because too on the nose?

I've read excerpts of The Hatred of Poetry and think I should read it.

Indeed you should, it's excellent. I can't think of a single similarly titled essay that isn't worth reading (Georges Bataille's own Hatred of Poetry aka The Impossible, Pascal Quignard's Hatred of Music, Jacques Rancière's Hatred of Democracy and William Marx's Hatred of Literature, which I assume has yet to be translated into English).

Aimless, that Louis Macniece poem is extraordinary

I thought it was one of the better things I've read in the past few years. It contains a lot in a little space. I can see where you might find resonances in it that correspond to your own circumstances.

Um, not to be weird, but some poems from my next book are up today here. Would love to hear your thoughts!

that macneice poem aimless posted (one of the only places it is available online??) just absolutely floored me last night. this stanza in particular:

See Belfast, devout and profane and hard,
Built on reclaimed mud, hammers playing in the shipyard,
Time punched with holes like a steel sheet, time
Hardening the faces, veneering with a grey and speckled rime
The faces under the shawls and caps:
This was my mother-city, these my paps.
Country of callous lava cooled to stone,
Of minute sodden haycocks, of ship-sirens’ moan,
Of falling intonations — I would call you to book
I would say to you, Look;
I would say, This is what you have given me
Indifference and sentimentality
A metallic giggle, a fumbling hand,
A heart that leaps to a fife band:
Set these against your water-shafted air
Of amethyst and moonstone, the horses’ feet like bells of hair
Shambling beneath the orange cart, the beer-brown spring
Guzzling between the heather, the green gush of Irish spring.
Cursed be he that curses his mother. I cannot be
Anyone else than what this land engendered me:
In the back of my mind are snips of white, the sails
Of the Lough’s fishing-boats, the bellropes lash their tails
When I would peal my thoughts, the bells pull free —
Memory in apostasy.

The latest LRB 'Close Reading' podcast is on Robert Frost: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-robert-frost

The discussion of Home Burial is excellent and the Randall Jarrell exposition of said poem even better. What a devastating poem.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial

https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/randall-jarrell-home-burial

I love how all of these literary reviews never review or talk about much that was written about about 1970. No wonder people think poetry is dead.

After about 1970, that is.

Like seriously, no one needs to read anything else about Frost, or Lowell, or Bishop, or any number of other confessional poets. Ever again. It's been flogged to death.

And here I thought Lowell's reputation was (again) in eclipse. Deservedly, I guess. I keep trying him.

I've been rereading Thom Gunn after purchasing the new collection.

Henri Cole too.

I've been reading P. Inman, Norma Cole, and Nicole Brossard. All wonderful. Cole is better known as a translator but her own work is spectacular, ponderous, uncanny in some ways. The selected from City Lights is worth the dough!

no one needs to read anything else about Frost, or Lowell, or Bishop, or any number of other confessional poets. No, I don't want to read anymore about them (least of all Lowell), but I like some poems by the first three, and other confessionals. I confess that even their lesser works mean more to me (I understand them better) than the maybe Ashbery-wannabee gibberish I keep coming across these days. Incl. by people who write very good prose, but you get to their chapbooks, collections, little mag appearances, even The New Yorker (for all its faults, one of the/maybe the only mainstream outlet for poetry), and these same writers suddenly seem---overcooked. Not always of course, but pretty often. To the extent that I've given up on most New Yorker poetry (fiction too), stick to the investigative journalism. Don't follow the lit mags as much as I used to. No doubt missing some good stuff, but that's how it is. Time is tight.

I think table just meant stuff "about" them. I still read Bishop and Frost; the latter, whom I've loved since I was 13, gets richer and more mysterious as I get older.