what poetry are you reading

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

I picked up a collection of Robinson Jeffers's poetry lately and have been reading his epic narrative poem, Tamar. I guess I don't read a lot of narrative poems, especially 20th century ones, but the material strikes as being a rather strange basis for writing a long poem about. A family living on an isolated stretch of the California coast is troubled by incest and madness. Maybe the point will become clearer by the end.

picked up Louis MacNiece's Autumn Journal last night. been a while since i read it, but it turns out i was exactly in the right mood. the mixture of poetic and more, well, 'journal' like cadences is very appealing - the a, b, c, b rhymes and half rhymes in the first section are one example of that, but so are the slightly awkward quotidian observations and considerations that don't quite fit into the poetic - either for reasons of scansion or register. the 'then, but then again' arguments – little palinodes, to use a word MacNeice uses early on of the retraction of summer to autumn - appropriate to someone observing and discussing with themselves. Emotional content closely linked with the immediate context and reminders, whether on the train up to London with his dog.

One line early on doesn't make sense to me, and I was going to take it to the poetry interpretation thread, but it's difficult to state the problem without citing all of the first section. That first section is very clear, and then, in that train up to London with his dog, 'a symbol of the abandoned order' who

Lies on the carriage floor,
Her eyes inept and glamorous as a film star's,
Who wants to live, ie wants more
Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations
As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water
But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.

Although there are some complications here, they're not hugely difficult, but I actually understand what 'controlled water' means. By analogy of the eliptical orbit 'curve of a planet', the 'controlled water' might mean a similar arc - but making water, that is having a piss, seems, to say the least, not right here. so is he talking about water out of a hose? That's as good as I can manage here, but it's not very satisfactory. Otherwise, i'm not at all clear.

Controlled water is a weird term that does exist. In the context of this I read it two ways:

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

So the first refers to the tides, no? The moon is earth’s satellite and in its orbit. However the moon also influences the tides. The tides exist as they do because the moon’s gravitational pull controls them. Tides are gradual, they erode cliffs and carve out the coastline over time.

Controlled water is a really weird term. Could refer to a lot of things within this context - rivers carving their pathways out, the effect of water on the natural landscape, the efforts to keep said bodies of water fit for consumption or to manage them in some way. It’s a long term project because of the delicacy of the ecosystem.

Idk, that’s the best I have. It is a weird line.

I don't know that poem, but coming after "curve of a planet" the phrase "controlled water" suggests to me the idea of the curious way gravity keeps all the water on the planet, trapped in a ball. It seems impossible that it all stays so neatly in shape rather than spilling out into space, but that is how physics works. And if that is the way the whole universe is set up, how crazy is it to expect (as the dog doesm as we do) that we might defy those forces and leap into the dark, go off on tangents, etc.

yep, i hadn't considered tides or that wider gravitational effect - seems very possible. my overall reading of the passage is that there is a difference between the life that recognises it follows a curve of forces and tensions torquing against each other, creating a defined, if mysterious, path, rather than a set of more or less accidental or arbitrary incidents, almost frivolous, without connexion.

the implication is not fate at work, as such, but capturing the path between intersecting movements... from summer to autumn, in the train's movement, in *movement's* movement, in people's movement:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals

(the opening lines)

And the rebels and the young
Have taken the train to town or the two-seater
Unravelling rails or road
Losing the thread deliberately behind them -
Autumnal palinode.
And I am in the train nowq too and summer is going
South as I go north

^ those last lines exactly what I mean by that torque created by intersecting forces.

this has now turned into a post that sits better on the other thread!

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

I agree that the use of "controlled water" is perplexing. I like the suggestion of the arc of water from a hose or from a man taking a piss, but I suspect he probably meant something about navigating a river or canal, e.g. following the bend in a river.

It seems the prevalence of the term "controlled water" was rising rapidly in the 1930s, and has since fallen.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=controlled+water&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true&direct_url=t4%3B%2Ccontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bcontrolled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20Water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BControlled%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BCONTROLLED%20WATER%3B%2Cc0

The Early Poems of Yvor Winters 1920-28

Now we’ve no hope of going back,
cutter, to that grey quay
where we moored twice and twice unwillingly
cast off our cables to put out at the slack
when the sea’s laugh was choked to a mutter
and the leach lifted hesitantly with a stutter
and sulky clack, how desolate the swatchways look,
cutter …

… We have no course to set,
only to drift too long, watch too glumly, and wait,
wait.

Basil Bunting, Perche no Spero

why would he want to go back to that? Does he say?