My formal study of poetry ends with figures writing in the 1950s. I'm trying to get a sense of what's going on in the world of poetry today, and I'd love to hear if y'all have any favorites of the last 20 years, especially people who are still working. The only person who meets that description that I have any familarity with is John Ashberry, and I am pretty much ready to admit I don't get him.
Thoughts/suggestions? Thanks!
Thoughts/suggestions? Thanks!
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Re: contemporary poetry
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 12:30 PM
...my favorite but a bit older than twenty, but just by a bit. It's quiet and personal and spare and mighty psychological with just the sweetest bit of impressionism. Laurie Blauner's still working, teaching some lit courses at some college or universidad somewhere...
What your body holds against you; Laurie Blauner
could be love in the right proportions. Don't confuse
form and content where a good sense of humor becomes
the kind of curves that makes a room loosen
around her. Look for a woman that listens to music
drifting over a lake, hovering like flies, or someone who will watch
the landscape emptied of azaleas under a setting sun
with you. By forty there is a sideshow of vanities:
the dragon breath you wake to, bones tossed
against your skin like waves, or the flesh that grows
where a waitress tucks her loose change. We measure
time with our lives. counting out the coins
year by year. We all become detectives of broken
hearts in off-season hotels where love and its accoutrements
wait by the roulette wheel for one chance at the big time.
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Re: contemporary poetry
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 3:22 PMIt's Ashbery with one r, by the way--you won't find him easily otherwise.
A few names: Pinsky; Louise Gluck; Jorie Graham; Frank Bidart; John Haines; W. S. Merwin. Mona van Duyn was quite good, and (I believe) died quite recently; likewise May Swenson. Richard Wilbur is still alive and writing; Anthony Hecht died recently (but you may know these).
Charles Wright (*Black Zodiac*, &c.) arguably the best living poet. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 4:27 PMSome of the 'poet's poets' these days include Ai, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Aimee Nezhukumutathil, James Stevens, Li-Young Lee, Ron Silliman, Sherman Alexie, Anne Waldman.
If you like modernism, you'll probably like most of these--very interesting verbal or imagistit intricacies. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 4:28 PMimagistic. Which probably isn't even a word.... -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Tue, September 13, 2005 - 4:53 PM> It's Ashbery with one r, by the way--you won't find him easily otherwise.
Even with one 'r', I don't find him easy.
Thanks for the recommendations, folks ... keep 'em coming!
BTW the above comment about Ashbery was a joke.
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Re: contemporary poetry
Fri, September 16, 2005 - 2:08 PMPaul Muldoon, the Ulster born poet is a favourite of mine, others include Jane Draycott and James Fenton. I also admire the work of Ted Hughes though he repeated the same themes throughout his career (which isn't a criticism as such) and Seamus Heaney is, I think, a marvellous writer.
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 7:17 AMIf you're ready to give up on Ashbery, it's likely you are at a crucial turning point. At the apex of Modernist poetics came the reactionaries (represented by most of the names offered in this thread thus far, but probably best exemplified by Auden. Since it seems you might want to be more proactive in your reading, I would actually recommend going back to that moment and looking at the so-called "anthology wars." Try _The New American Poetry_ and _Revolution of the Word_ for starters. The latter, especially, will put much of contemporary poetry into perspective in terms of aesthetic lineage.
But, if you admit you don't get it -- whatever "it" happens to be -- aren't you being a good modernist? I mean, that's the gist of "negative capability," no? -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 9:43 AMI'm trying a new approach to Mr. Ashbery and hoping it pays off. I'm going to try to flank him and come up the rear, through WC Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and then Ashbery again. There seems to be something of a thematic and stylistic continuity here to some degree, so we'll see if I come away with more of an understanding.
I will also have a look at the anthologies you suggest - thanks for the recommendation! -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 11:20 AMI love Ashbery. I love him a lot. His poetry is kind of like the negative spaces between the shapes of things, and the motion of objects rather than the appearance and position of them.
I guess though that a lot of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets have gotten over themselves, however. There seems to be a reaction back to....something, not sure what yet. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 11:36 AM> His poetry is kind of like the negative spaces between the shapes of things, and the motion of objects rather than the appearance and position of them.
Thank you for this - that's very helpful. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 1:56 PMyeah, and you might apply the negative spaces to stevens --- i sometimes think of ashbery as everything stevens didn't say, but that couldn't be said or understood without what stevens said.
wow, did i say that?! -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 1:58 PMMaybe I shouldn't read them together then ... they might mutually annihilate, like a particle and its anti-particle. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, December 19, 2005 - 3:13 PMi just discovered Eavan Boland. She's a pretty important Irish voice, a woman's voice. "The Pomegranate" was my first experience with her poetry.
she still teaches at Stanford, i believe. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 6:51 AMJorie Graham is breath taking, I think someone already suggested her work. Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy, two British, poets are fantastic. Some Canadian poets: Jan Zwicky, Karen Solie, Ken Babstock, Don McKay.
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 10:25 AM(Chiming in late here as I wasn't a member of the tribe when this thread originated. Thanks for reviving an interesting topic, Marvel!)
"I guess though that a lot of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets have gotten over themselves, however. There seems to be a reaction back to....something, not sure what yet."
Yeah, I think some of the original "language" poets have (recent work I've read by Rae Armantrout, for example, is actually, umm, kind of meaningful! *gasp*) but there seems to be a new, even more opaque and precious generation out there. Have you read Joan Houlihan's devastating critique of this new-gen "language, post-structuralism-influenced, neo-surrealist, post-avant" poetry published last year in Contemporary Poetry Review? www.cprw.com/Houlihan/wolff.htm Well worth a read!
While I don't agree with every little thing in Houlihan's review, her deconstruction of the truly dreadful poems she features is brilliant and very funny and her technique of cutting up the lines and then having her students "reassemble" the poem in whatever way made sense to them is a stroke of genius (and something you could do in your own classroom on a slow day!) and probably more effective as criticism than anything she could possibly write. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Mon, April 17, 2006 - 10:08 AMHoulihan's "review" is not critical. It is not even polemic. It is underhanded. Any "fun" it elicits would be nihilistic. The hubris with which experimental work is dimissed is astonishing, and squarely outside any real USAmerican literary tradition.
Emerson: "one must be an inventor to read well"
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 11:28 AMContemporary poets I really like and whose work I follow (all over the map in terms of style/school):
Anne Carson, Adam Zagajewski, Kathleen Jamie, Eavan Boland (although I think I like her mid-period work best), Anne Waldmann, Anne Stevenson, Rae Armantrout, John Burnside (a technically very conservative but very consistent, accomplished and often very moving poet), Yves Bonnefoy, Michèle Métail (way way out there!), Michelle Grangaud, Michel Deguy (one of France's most remarkable contemporary poets, though quite an old man now), Paolo Ruffilli, Sawako Nakayasu...
I could go on and on but I think that's enough for one post! -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 12:20 PMWow, Marie - you're the spitting image of William Butler Yeats! Are you Irish? -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 12:25 PMNo. Amazing how that works, huh? Are you Tibetan? ;-p -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 12:38 PMI find Anne Carson cold and bit too erudite to be very accessible, but have not yet read Decreation which was recommended to me.
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 1:19 PMNagarjuna is actually Indian, FWIW .... -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 2:35 PMYes, the sage himself was, but the art style of this particular piece looks Tibetan to me (and Nagarjuna has historically been more important in Tibet and China than in India, I believe). Is this actually an Indian painting? -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 2:46 PMMy Yeats comment was intended as a playful joke, because I like that drawing. You seem have taken personally for some reason, and I'm not sure why. I can say that this converstaion is no fun any more.
Yes, the painting in Tibetan. I don't see the relevance of whether the painting is Tibetan or Indian. -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 3:06 PMThanks for the link and the fun with students tip, MT!! I will try that!
She wasn't taking it personally, barnaby, she was being equally playful--tossing the volley back and then it got sillier and geekier. Whee!!!
Me, I'm the spitting image of some thoroughly non-repentant Magdalene (or else Prince Hamlet). -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 4:05 PMOhwait, I'm not Magdalene anymore. I'm a pair of tiny Japanese moth-worshipping fairies.
My ego boundaries! -
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 4:26 PM"I'm a pair of tiny Japanese moth-worshipping fairies. "
Is that what those are?!? I tried to figure out what on earth they were when you first changed avatars but the original is still so small I couldn't quite tell. Tiny or not, they're cute as the dickens.
Ego boundaries are over-rated! ;-)
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 4:21 PMOh no, Barnaby. Please accept my apologies if I offended you. That certainly wasn't my intention! It is so hard to convey a joking tone in these brief text messages. In truth, I was just so impressed by the painting that I wanted to know what it was. Buddhist art and Buddhism in general aren't my areas of expertise (I know just enough to know that I know virtually nothing) and I thought perhaps I'd made a mistake in attribution.
Actually, I caught the faulty logic in my original query to you (referencing the image rather than the thing/person represented as in your original comment) as I was driving away in my car this afternoon and planned to cop to that later (you would have had to ask me if I was American because the drawing's by Sargent, etc.) -
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Re: contemporary poetry
Wed, March 22, 2006 - 9:22 PMOh, sorry for the confusion. I'm glad we sorted that out. Thanks to you too, Shannon.
Recognizing this snake-head guy as Nagarjuna, and knowing that he's significant in India, China, and Tibet, tells me you know A LITTLE about Buddhism. ;)
I had a printout of that picture of Yeats on my desk at work, and I would look at it and daydream of quitting, and sailing to Byzantium. :)
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