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.
― vivian dark, Tuesday, 7 April 2020 03:03 (four years ago) link
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.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 7 April 2020 09:54 (four years ago) link
i have nothing not mean spirited to say about heaney so will avoid further comment
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Tuesday, 7 April 2020 10:21 (four years ago) link
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.
― vivian dark, Sunday, 12 April 2020 03:32 (four years ago) link
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.
― coviderunt omnes (pomenitul), Sunday, 12 April 2020 04:21 (four years ago) link
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
― dow, Monday, 13 April 2020 19:01 (four years ago) link
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.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:10 (four years ago) link
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, chasedfewer demons out of the parking lotwhere 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 aboutbeing apprenticed to eternity. A gavotte of dust motescame to replace my seeing. Everything was as thoughit had happened long agoin ancient peach-colored funny paperswherein the law of true opposites was ordainedcasually. Then the book opened by itselfand read to us: “You pack of liars,of course tempted by the crossroads, but I like eachand 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, dawncondenses 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 itselfas far as the cabbage-hemmed horizons. And if I put a littlebit of myself in this time, stoppered the liquor that is our selves’truant exchanges, brandished my intentionsfor once? But only I getsomething out of this memory.A kindly gnomeof fear perched on my dashboard once, but we had allbeen instructedto ignore the conditions of the chase. Here, itseems to grow lighter with each passing century. No matterhow you twist it,life stays frozen in the headlights.Funny, none of us heard the roar
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 13 April 2020 19:14 (four years ago) link
Wowwww, thanks!
― dow, Monday, 13 April 2020 22:13 (four years ago) link
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 haveheard more women call women whores than we have heard mencall women whores. We have more light than we know what to dowith. Live with it. Some time ago, a Woman asked us for fivewomen we loved and five women we hated and five women wehated to love . . . or maybe five women we hated and five womenwe loved and five women we loved to hate . . . or both. We haven’tbeen able to answer. We’re trying not to sing too easy green andviolet veins meaning moth-winged flower or would it be worse to say bloom? The shackled hardwood, the ribs of the house, the ribsof a huge beast, the ribs of a fossil, the ribs of a thing destined tobe stone. We call ourselves Away. Stranded is a place not a thing
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Tuesday, 14 April 2020 12:18 (four years ago) link
(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)
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Tuesday, 14 April 2020 12:19 (four years ago) link
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.
― dow, Tuesday, 14 April 2020 21:30 (four years ago) link
This is a good tweet.
At the last we wantunit costs plus VAT, patient grading:made to order, made to care, poisedat the nub of avid sugar soap.-- J.H. Prynne, The Oval Window (1983) pic.twitter.com/hLsX6fIOmk— Jeremy Noel-Tod (@jntod) April 16, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:35 (four years ago) link
is it tho
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:45 (four years ago) link
i lazily copied the kocher poem above from elsewhere on the internet and gosh, i just realised they've re-punctuated it
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:46 (four years ago) link
A lot of tweets are good not bad imo.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 16 April 2020 12:54 (four years ago) link
sure but in the hierarchy of things tweeted is that really one of the better ones
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 16 April 2020 13:02 (four years ago) link
It's got potential in that I nearly picked up my J.H. Prynne's Poems to read the whole thing.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 16 April 2020 13:05 (four years ago) link
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
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 16 April 2020 13:08 (four years ago) link
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-flowBetween the islands, sleek and black and irrelevantThey cannot depose logically what they want:Died by gunshot under borrowed pennons,Sniped from the wet gorse and taken by the limp finsAnd slung like a dead seal in a boghole, beaten upBy peasants with long lips and the whisky-drinker’s cough.Park your car in the city of Dublin, see Sackville StreetWithout the sandbags in the old photos, meetThe statues of the patriots, history never dies,At any rate in Ireland, arson and murder are legaciesLike 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, timeHardening the faces, veneering with a grey and speckled rimeThe 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 bookI would say to you, Look;I would say, This is what you have given meIndifference and sentimentalityA metallic giggle, a fumbling hand,A heart that leaps to a fife band:Set these against your water-shafted airOf amethyst and moonstone, the horses’ feet like bells of hairShambling beneath the orange cart, the beer-brown springGuzzling between the heather, the green gush of Irish spring.Cursed be he that curses his mother. I cannot beAnyone else than what this land engendered me:In the back of my mind are snips of white, the sailsOf the Lough’s fishing-boats, the bellropes lash their tailsWhen I would peal my thoughts, the bells pull free —Memory in apostasy.I would tot up my factorsBut who can stand in the way of his soul’s steam-tractors?I can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland isA 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 fourWas the trade-mark of a hound and a round tower,And that was Irish glamour, and in the cemeterySham Celtic crosses claimed our individuality,And my father talked about the West where years backHe played hurley on the sands with a stick of wrack.Park your car in Killarney, buy a souvenirOf 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 pityUnder your plate for the emigrant,Take credit for our sanctity, our heroism and our sterile wantColumba Kevin and briny Brendan the accepted names,Wolfe Tone and Grattan and Michael Collins the accepted names,Admire the suavity with which the architectIs rebuilding the burnt mansion, recollectThe palmy days of the Horse Show, swank your fill,But take the Holyhead boat before you pay the bill;Before you face the consequenceOf inbred soul and climatic maleficenceAnd pay for the trick beauty of a prismIn drug-dull fatalism.I will exorcise my bloodAnd not to have my baby-clothes my shroudI will acquire an attitude not yoursAnd become as one of your holiday visitors,And however often I may comeFarewell, my country, and in perpetuum;Whatever desire I catch when your wind scours my faceI will take home and put in a glass caseAnd merely look onAt 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 mindsFuddled 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 windI must go east and stay, not looking behind,Not knowing on which day the mist is blanket-thickNor when sun quilts the valley and quickWinging shadows of white clouds passOver the long hills like a fiddler’s phrase.If I were a dog of sunlight I would boundFrom Phoenix Park to Achill Sound,Picking up the scent of a hundred fugitivesThat have broken the mesh of ordinary lives,But being ordinary too I must in course discussWhat we mean to Ireland or Ireland to us;I have to observe milestone and curioThe 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-millsThat swallow the shawled file, the black moor where halfA turf-stack stands like a ruined cenotaph;Good-bye your hens running in and out of the white houseYour absent-minded goats along the road, your black cowsYour greyhounds and your hunters beautifully bredYour drums and your dolled-up virgins and your ignorant dead.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 23 April 2020 01:42 (four years ago) link
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 hearingOr caring, although these still live and are generousAnd are all ways contained, allowed to come and goIndefinitely in and out of the stockadeThey have so much trouble remembering, when yourforgettingRescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, 23 April 2020 15:38 (four years ago) link
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.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 23 April 2020 15:41 (four years ago) link
He's got my number
― dow, Thursday, 23 April 2020 16:03 (four years ago) link
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.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, 23 April 2020 16:28 (four years ago) link
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.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 26 June 2020 17:23 (three years ago) link
'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?
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 26 June 2020 17:27 (three years ago) link
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).
― pomenitul, Friday, 26 June 2020 18:22 (three years ago) link
Aimless, that Louis Macniece poem is extraordinary
― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Monday, 13 July 2020 01:05 (three years ago) link
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.
― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless), Monday, 13 July 2020 03:11 (three years ago) link
Um, not to be weird, but some poems from my next book are up today here. Would love to hear your thoughts!
― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Friday, 31 July 2020 14:30 (three years ago) link
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, timeHardening the faces, veneering with a grey and speckled rimeThe 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 bookI would say to you, Look;I would say, This is what you have given meIndifference and sentimentalityA metallic giggle, a fumbling hand,A heart that leaps to a fife band:Set these against your water-shafted airOf amethyst and moonstone, the horses’ feet like bells of hairShambling beneath the orange cart, the beer-brown springGuzzling between the heather, the green gush of Irish spring.Cursed be he that curses his mother. I cannot beAnyone else than what this land engendered me:In the back of my mind are snips of white, the sailsOf the Lough’s fishing-boats, the bellropes lash their tailsWhen I would peal my thoughts, the bells pull free —Memory in apostasy.
― k3vin k., Monday, 3 August 2020 17:29 (three years ago) link
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
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 10:42 (three years ago) link
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.
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 12:50 (three years ago) link
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.
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 12:52 (three years ago) link
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.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 13:00 (three years ago) link
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!
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 15:01 (three years ago) link
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.
― dow, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 15:19 (three years ago) link
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.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 15:26 (three years ago) link
Yes, I too went with a distinction between reading about them and reading them.
― dow, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 15:41 (three years ago) link
Not even the 'educated' reader wants to comes across names of poets they don't recognize straight away. Better to rehash the same high school/undergrad headliners over and over again, forever.
― pomenitul, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 15:50 (three years ago) link
Reminds me: I should try the poems of Natasha Trethewey (b. 1965) on the page: have only heard her reading them---once at a book fair long ago, and very quietly, but impressions have lingered, of sort of a palimpsest quailty, also As I Lay Dying, shifting POV back and forth very personally, but clearly enough, except this was through the centuries. Also several times on the radio, and have read an excerpt from her new memoir, which employed some use of imagery more associated with poetry, without overloading the sentences.
― dow, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 16:14 (three years ago) link
But given all that, or not, who are some younger poets I should check out, born in the 70s-80s-90s?
― dow, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 16:59 (three years ago) link
Kenneth Goldsmith
(j/k, table can advise you better. I'd have to mull it over but one name that immediately springs to mind is the late Simon Howard… who was born in 1960, as it turns out.)
― pomenitul, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 17:06 (three years ago) link
I'll recommend Mathieu Brosseau some day, when his work becomes available in English.
― pomenitul, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 17:09 (three years ago) link
I really despise Bishop's poetry! And as for Lowell, the only poem of his worth a shit afaic is an obscure one: "New York Fragment 1962," or something to that degree.
Tretheway is fine, if a little too mainstream for my tastes— anyone who has been poet laureate of the US has to be! and that's fine.
dow, if you're in search of more straightforward lyric work written by younger poets, I might not be the best to do so, because I don't read much in that realm.
One person whom I think EVERYONE should read is Tongo Eisen-Martin. Here's a little sampling: https://lithub.com/two-poems-by-tongo-eisen-martin/
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 17:53 (three years ago) link
As far as poets, my highest-rated rotate quite a lot, but at the moment: JH PrynneLisa RobertsonNorma ColeJean DayDambudzo MarecheraNicole BrossardMark Francis JohnsonLyn Hejinian
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 17:58 (three years ago) link
Of those I've read, I'd like to second these:
JH PrynneLisa RobertsonNicole BrossardLyn Hejinian
None of them were born in the 70s-80s-90s, though.
― pomenitul, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 18:14 (three years ago) link
That's true!
In terms of younger poets, the aforementioned Tongo Eisen-Martin is a good one...Here are some more:Layli Long SoldierJasmine GibsonJ. Gordon FaylorBrandon BrownLawrence GiffinSamantha GilesTrisha LowJamie TownsendDanielle La FranceMercedes Eng
And I'm pretty sure that all of these poets are under the age of 35...I'd recommend Nora Treatbaby, cat tyc, mai doan, and S*an D. Henry-Smith. https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/the-recluse/issue-16
― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Tuesday, 18 August 2020 18:20 (three years ago) link
The start of mass destructionBegins and endsIn restaurant bathroomsThat some people useAnd other people clean
“you telling me there’s a rag in the sky?”-waiting for you. yes-that building wants to climb up and jump off another building-these are downtown decisions
O man, I see what you mean. Thanks for Tongo, table, all yall for other recs, will check some.
― dow, Tuesday, 18 August 2020 18:26 (three years ago) link