what poetry are you reading

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.

Yes, I too went with a distinction between reading about them and reading them.

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.

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.

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.

But given all that, or not, who are some younger poets I should check out, born in the 70s-80s-90s?

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.)

I'll recommend Mathieu Brosseau some day, when his work becomes available in English.

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/

As far as poets, my highest-rated rotate quite a lot, but at the moment:
JH Prynne
Lisa Robertson
Norma Cole
Jean Day
Dambudzo Marechera
Nicole Brossard
Mark Francis Johnson
Lyn Hejinian

Of those I've read, I'd like to second these:

JH Prynne
Lisa Robertson
Nicole Brossard
Lyn Hejinian

None of them were born in the 70s-80s-90s, though.

That's true!

In terms of younger poets, the aforementioned Tongo Eisen-Martin is a good one...
Here are some more:
Layli Long Soldier
Jasmine Gibson
J. Gordon Faylor
Brandon Brown
Lawrence Giffin
Samantha Giles
Trisha Low
Jamie Townsend
Danielle La France
Mercedes 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

The start of mass destruction
Begins and ends
In restaurant bathrooms
That some people use
And 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.

I'm guilty of reading mainly dead poets. It's partly laziness but mostly its because I do still sort of need a guide. The Tongo Eisen-Martin looks great - I'll start there.

Both of his books are excellent. I'm partial to the first one (someone's dead already), but that just might be because I've read it a few more times

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.
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 bookmarkflaglink

Reckon the LRB is making an effort to publish younger poets, but it was never their beat I think.

Just came across The Homeric Hymns(Johns Hopkins, 2004):A rich source for students of Greek mythology and literature, the Homeric hymns are also fine poetry. Attributed by the ancients to Homer, these prooimia , or preludes, were actually composed over centuries and used by poets to prepare for the singing or recitation of longer portions of the Homeric epics. In his acclaimed translations of the hymns, Apostolos Athanassakis preserves the essential simplicity of the original Greek, offering a straightforward, line-by-line translation that makes no attempts to masquerade or modernize. For this long-awaited new edition, Athanassakis enhances his classic work with a comprehensive index, careful and selective changes in the translations themselves, and numerous additions to the notes which will enrich the reader's experience of these ancient and influential poems.
Seller's page for it is linked below, can click on cover and read intro, which is very detailed, but looks clear enough. Any of you familiar with this or another collection of these poems? Good? https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/homeric-hymns_homer/275741/#isbn=0801879833&idiq=7781887

I picked up Chris Nealon's latest book on a recommendation earlier this year (can't remember if rec'd by twitter or ILX) but I haven't had room in my reading habitus for longish poems until recently. It turns out, though, that the 5 in this book are perfectly proportioned for me to consume one at a time at home on the couch with my morning coffee, reaching the end just as the cat begins to feel neglected and starts acting out.

Anyway, I'm really liking what I've read so far, so thanks to whoever made that recommendation!

I gave that book away tbh, but I'm...picky.

Lol, I am the furthest thing possible from picky. You know how sometimes a person in rehab will describe themself as a "garbage can" drug user, meaning "I would put anything and everything into my body"? I'm that way with poetry. With drugs, too, but that's a different tense of "would."

So I opened The Shore up and flipped to the poem that begins "Say you have a sexual fantasy that makes you feel like a man" and went Heyyy, I like the sound of this already!!

I think it's that I love Chris, we are friends, but while I find the content of the poems fine, there's so little going on formally or on the space of the page that I'm sort of left flat.

These are poetry readings, so I'm putting this here, as well as Rolling Reissues:

The Last Readings, presented by Wax Audio Group, in cooperation with mondayMedia and the Bukowski estate, is a Kickstarter campaign to remaster, restore and preserve the complete audio masters of these final live performances as an archival quality 4 disc limited edition vinyl record box set, with new liner notes, essays and unpublished photos. This limited edition boxset and "concert" t shirts will not be sold at retail.
more info:
https://forcefieldpr.cmail19.com/t/ViewEmail/j/B4722FF5574187192540EF23F30FEDED/784F6B300C59C6282540EF23F30FEDED

I've never read his poetry, which some say isn't as good as the stories, but here tis. Like several other leading Beats, he was a performer, so maybe hearing it helps (as with Ginsberg, Burroughs, Michael McClure, even Kerouac).

Although apparently Buk didn't work with musicians, as they did on record.

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
- Charles Bukowski True?

If they think anyone except pick up artists and 15 year olds who've moved beyond 4chan give a shit about Bukowski, they're sadly mistaken.

Fat drunk misogynist who wrote one good poem.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-genius-of-the-crowd/

if that's his best, never mind the rest for sure.

<blushes with shame at user name>

Fwiw, I signed up in around 2004. I don't think I've read the miserable old bastard since. Bukowski would be good example for the 'separating art from artist' thread, albeit his art isn't really up to much. Also, fat, drunk misogynist isn't a bad catchall for a whole bunch of mid-C20 writers.

Poetry adjacent, rather than poetry but... Flatter myself that I know a bit about contemporary poetry but I had never even *heard* of Kay Ryan (apparently she was US Poet Laureate and everything) until coming across this review of her collected essays the other day https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/26/kay-ryan-giddy-with-thinking/

Turns out she is an absolute treat! Almost too pat to say it's like Emily Dickinson judiciously pruning Marianne Moore, but... it's true.

Also reading the e-book (much more approachable than the overwhelming 700 page doorstop incarnation) of Don Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre which is more fun than I had been expecting. Have always been a fan of DP's prose but had soured on his more recent books of poetry; this makes me want to go back to them.

I've heard of Kay Ryan, never really read her. Tbh if someone is US poet laureate, it probably means I'll hate their work lol.

Tbh if someone is US poet laureate, it probably means I'll hate their work lol.

Good rule of thumb imo. See also: Canada poet laureate, UK poet laureate, etc.

Yep. I mean I love a lot of poets who've won prominent awards-- Cecily Nicholson, who won the Gov a few years back, is a great poet and a friend. But an award like that is one thing...being a poetic mouthpiece for a country is another.

B-but you don't hate xpost Natasha Trethewey, do ya?! She doesn't seem like a mouthpiece for anybody, from what I've read. May be a few dutiful bits of that somewhere, but who is gonna remember.