what poetry are you reading

'I'm just gonna say some asinine, vaguely wistful recollected-in-tranquillity shit in prose then add some random line breaks to make it look like a poem', which is 95% of so-called contemporary poetry anyway. Not sure about the percentage, since I don't read that much poetry, but agree about the "tendency," which often seems dutiful, school-paper--y, but this particular poem, though I shouldn't have chosen it, is not nearly as bad as you describe it, get back Jo Jo!

probably not very much to your taste though table xp

Kay Ryan packs a lot of gnomic wit in her verse; the wit's in the enjambments. I'll take her over Ammons (whom I like, I must say).

this is probably my favorite of ryan's poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40887/the-fabric-of-life

they all work this way so it's truly you either like it or dislike it on impact, even though i remember say uncle growing on me extremely as i progressed through it

"don't look back" also slaps imo https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39960

i just like that they're these compressed ideas that internally rhyme

I used to try keeping up with anglophone poetry when I was younger. Of the 'bigger' (more like mid-tier, celebrity-wise) post-1980 (ish) American poets I remember enjoying, I had a soft spot for Michael Palmer, Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clark Coolidge, Cole Swensen and… I'm forgetting lots.

i have very basic taste in poetry mostly because i don't like poems or poets v much to begin with. i dated a poet once and in briefly inhabiting that circle i discovered it was somehow worse than new york media

that grahn poem is incredible table, let me be another person to thank you for sharing it

Here's one for the art vs artists thread: I like poetry but I hate poets.

I mean, not exactly (I don't hate table, for one ;)), but you get my drift.

I'm rereading Rita Dove. What do we think of her?

Ha, well Brad, I would never date another poet. I never have, in fact, something I am rather proud of.

As far as poetry tastes in general, while I can easily categorize and place and judge other poets and poems, at the end of the day, I also know that my own preferences are usually so far outside any sort of visibility or popular attention that I find it difficult to spend too much time worrying about stuff I don't like.

That doesn't mean I don't wish the stuff I like was more popular, but I also realize that not many want to read Dorothy Lusk or Prynne or whatever.

lol i dated and then married a poet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

in spite of the steady stream of poetry books entering our apartment i haven't read much poetry at all lately, mostly occupied with novels at the moment (which is funny because a few years ago i went through a whole anti-novel thing and mostly read poetry. circle of life etc). but whenever i get back to that place i've got a pretty sizable to-read pile here (including your new one, T!)

i mean tbf i was very much in love with the poet i dated. otherwise generally recommend never dating writers

I'm rereading Rita Dove. What do we think of her?

She has only four mentions on ILX, including the two on this thread.

Rita Dove is okay. She has a sense of the line that I can get behind, even if I think some of her work falls into the 'dilatory epiphanic' mode that so annoys me.

Isn't "Dilatory Epiphanic" a Paul Simon song?

Lol

I only know Thomas and Beulah

Diane di Prima passed away today. One of the greats and one of the few left of her generation. Her kind and generous spirit will be missed.

Aimless that macniece you posted in april last year was the ticket and no mistake

yeah I remember being really struck by that one

Muireadh dhea you're at least ninety percent irish by poetry alone at this stage yrself

I'm at the point in the term where I'm so exhausted I can't really read anything at all but have been sitting up and browsing Frank O'Hara when I can't sleep. His profligacy allows for a lightness of reading and the tumble of images, the sense of movement, the roll call of names and places scrolling by in a great horny rush is oddly soothing. CK Stead wrote about Shakespeare that even at his most clotted, his eyes and his mind, like those of a runner are set well ahead of his feet and I love that sense of O'Hara flooding the page with sense impressions.

Anyway, this caught my eye last night:

Mayakovsky

1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Actually relatively housebound for O'Hara? I get a bit of Dylan Thomas from this; maybe some Hart Crane.

Also Kafka's The Lost Writings, published in translation by Michael Hofmann last year. And very rainy day relatable just now; thanks.

maybe especially:
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Love that O'Hara poem

Jim Morrison's poem "Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased" was distributed at each of The Doors two July 21, 1969 shows at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles. Jim Morrison died exactly two years after Brian Jones on July 3, 1971, both of them were 27 yrs old. pic.twitter.com/fpltB6MyZi

— Wendy O'Rourke (@wendyOrourke) July 3, 2019

I prefer God Star

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/05/27/lovesick-for-a-god/

hans arp

read that nyrb article when that issue came out and definitely made me interested. how is it?

Clayton Eshleman died last year.  Years ago on ILB I posted the single fact I knew about him, found in the biography of Zukofsky by Scroggins.  The poem mentioned was called "The Moistinsplendour" and it appeared in the Spring 1968 issue of Caterpillar.  Last month I read the biography of Lorine Niedecker by Peters, and Niedecker disliked that poem too.  That motivated me to dig it up.  Google found the title in Eshleman's book Indiana, published in 1969, which would be right.  Google didn't lie, but it turns out Eshleman used the word in a different poem, and the poem of that title isn't collected there.  It's a nice-looking book from Black Sparrow, and at 178 pages it's a substantial collection of poetry.  I've been trying to understand why so little of the poetry worked.  The bad judgment evidenced by that anecdote wasn't a one-off, it's throughout the book.  Separately, I was waiting for a transfiguration of all those personal musings into poetry.  Eshleman never managed it, though he tried very hard (possibly too hard).  I was reminded of watching someone flick his cigarette lighter over and over but never start a flame.  There were some fun passages, though.

I come in fury against Robert Bly & the Falsifiers of the animal.

Swindle cloaked in spiritum - Robert Kelly - but more true:
I see Robert Kelly exercising in the Valley of Death.

Robert Lowell is the Wickerman of Scandinavia: Merton the
Spectre of Hart Crane.

Must Barbara be expelled to cast out Johnson?

It was all an unnecessary detour, because the issue of Caterpillar is here with the poem I was looking for.  Relevant sample:

  OUR MASS
TURBINED
  INTO MAREEEEEEEE,
flunking
you,
fuckit outa you,
fuckit outa you,
our Lady
  in the Sea
ops groind
oru
eating,
  at the base of the tree
there aint no Artaud thing to rehearse
no Louis eating Celia
   wirejawed retriever
locked in its curse,

    lower level,
to aim
    at who are human,
now regenerated
youd suckoff Zukofsky
who wld suckoff you
   means you no

longer play by their games.

Well, that would put off the hypersensitive, uxorious, 64-year-old Zukofsky.  Eshleman really does seem to be purging himself of him.

This is a kristMass
DECK THE HALLS

   Out old Fustum out Zukofsky
Out old Blakam

Eshleman reminds me of Vachel Lindsay, a sort of headlong un-self-aware carrying on in the wrong direction.

Eshleman was a terrible poet but a fine editor and an incredible translator-- his work on Césaire is enough to endear him to me for life.

But yeah, his poetry is...awful. Jerry Rothenberg his friend was the same way, incredible editor and critic, but his poetry was just abysmal

Reading Robert Kelly pic.twitter.com/nK4bqpOWGa

— Charlotte Mandell (@avecsesdoigts) March 18, 2022

"Clayton Eshleman died last year"

I love his work on Vallejo's poetry.

can't say i much liked the one kelly collection i've read, but should give him another go, i guess.

still need to make a start on the césaire translation mentioned above. have had it sitting around for over a decade now.

only poetry i've read in an age is orlando furioso which probably doesn't count as it was translated into prose (still good though!)

& mention of clark coolidge's name here/other ilb threads was ringing a bell for me... turns out it's because he played drums for serpent power :-O

nlt, Coolidge is/was a very accomplished jazz drummer. He's written some about jazz, too.

Kelly is very hit or miss for me. There's a bit too much self-conscious feeling "mysticism" in his work for me to really latch onto anything too much, tho a friend of mine was his student and swears by him, and one of my favorite poets (Kenneth Irby) was good friends with him.

I've only encountered Kelly via Charlotte's twitter. In the main I really connect with what is flowing out of him but I've not actually sat down with a book of his.

Or not reading.

Across the hall was Hannah. She'd been a normal, middle class housewife, married to an accountant or something in Connecticut or somewhere. Then she had taken LSD, or lots of LSD, and her life had gone on a little detour. Now she lived alone in the East Village, saw words on her forehead, and made poems out of them.

Years later, I was in a used book store and actually saw her book. There was a picture of Hannah's pleasant, loppy face beaming out from the cover. Written on her forehead in crayon was, "I See Words on My Forehead." I wonder how many copies were sold.

-- John Lurie

Lurie might well have been bemused. I have looked into Hannah Weiner's Open House and it was painful to read. Code Poems was great, but what the poetry world makes of her later ramblings I don't know. Having been the lifeline for nearly 20 years of a close friend suffering from schizophrenia, I loathe mental illness and all its works.

fwiw that book he mentions goes for a fair amount of money these days

i've read 'spoke' and 'the fast' by hannah weiner in the last couple of years, both - the latter particularly - are great

Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Ammons, Sphere

I Share My Bed with a Large Dog

After I’ve rumpled the sheets
wrestled and tossed and turned
After I’ve seen you shake in your dreams
and pulled you back from your apprehensions

After the deep breathing and chests heaving
stretching and whining and wide yawning snores
After the first sun shows on the ceiling
slips down the wall, the dresser, the floor

After your nose starts to sound like a whistle
I raise my phone to check in on the weather
After you have seen me move you feel better
Your brown eyes wide open and paw pads like leather

only after that —
and after the your sharp elbows rib my core —
only after all of that could we crawl out of bed

sorry, i meant that for another thread

sure you did

for me: Beowulf!

i truly did!

which translation?

The Heaney one after a friend said I must.

Saner, So This Is The Map