Are you a fan of poetry?

Try Wislawa Szymborska. To-the-point, no bullshit, and remarkably perceptive and intelligent.

There was a young fellow named Tucker

Who, instructing a novice cocksucker,

Said, "Don't blow out your lips

Like an elephant's hips;

The boys like it best when you pucker."

I liked Matt Rasmussen's 'Black Aperture.' Dark stuff (mainly about his brother's suicide) though.

This includes a lot of the Beat Poets:

Although I can only read in translation, Neruda is my favorite.

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."

I will get crucified here but Camille Paglia’s collection of the 50 most seminal poems is a great intro. It’s called Break, Blow and something.

I’ll never forget Dr Fucks

R6 where can I find it?

I like didactic poetry like r2.

Frederick Seidel and Ben Lerner are two contemporary poets worth reading.

Also Louise Gluck who won the Nobel prize recently

Tiana Clark

Have you read Dr Fucks?

Anything by Lester Jacobs

R6 The title is Break, Blow, Burn after lines in John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV.

I have always had a fondness for DH Lawrence's Birds, Beasts, Flowers (1923).

James Merrill is a great poet who happens to be gay. Walt Whitman is transcendent. Auden, Spender, Plath, Hughes are worthies as is Gluck as someone mentioned above.

Relevant reading during the current political/societal nightmare we've been experiencing for far too long now. She calls the United States on the carpet, laying down the facts of the matter. She cites its willful, shameless hypocrisy and pleads with it to live up to all its grandiose hype.

Is Fanny Howe contemporary? I think she's still living. He work can be hard to dig through, but I always feel like I get a little wisdom out of it.

I think of Levine's "What Work Is" so often these days. All these wannabe revolutionaries and rich people larping as oppressed.

Marianne Moore (family), May Sarton (family), Mary Oliver (family)

Sarton for form--she is only a minor poet; Moore for greatness; Oliver for wisdom and sensibility.

Ah, you beat me to it, R19. I adore Mary Oliver. When Death Comes is my favorite.

Natalie Diaz is pretty trippy and out there.

Henri Cole. Gay poet. He writes about loneliness, men, animals, memory, nature. Most famous book is probably Pierce the Skin.

Jericho Brown is a gorgeous gay poet. His "Bullet Points" has been shared a lot recently.

Another one from Jericho Brown, this one about Grindr.

R1 thinks she knows what poetry is.

R1 is a philistine cunt.

And one more poet, Sarah Howe. Here's one for our evening punctualist.

And one more from Sarah Howe...

Elizabeth Bishop is probably one on the greatest poets of the last century. Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes and Anne Carson are favorites of mine too but start with Bishop.

One of my favorite poems is by Louise Gluck, a short prayer poem, deep daily love.

Great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich. XVII of her 21 love poems is my favorite.

Patricia Lockwood is a young poet who will probably win a Nobel or MacArthur someday and she never went to college and her father is a Catholic priest through some weird loophole.

No crucifixion here, R6, you're right. Poetry is now thought of as this only-for-intellectuals thing, like particle physics but the arts version, and I recommend that book to everyone who thinks they won't/can't "understand" poetry.

David Berman. He was so good he killed himself.

[quote] through some weird loophole

R31 What do you mean 'loophole'?

The spring has sprung, the grass iz riz

I wonder where dem boidies iz

Fleas

Adam had 'em

There is a modern poetry scene, that isn't corny "spoken word" bullshit, mostly in Eastern Europe. In the USA, it's pretty grim. Americans don't read easily accessible airport fiction, so poetry is something they equate with a "hip" cool high school teacher who wanted to diddle them.

Everyone of note says Poetry died a century ago.

It is no longer a valid art form. It is comatose.

It is merely a refuge for the unlovable.

Denise Duhamel is one of my favorites.

r38 Ouch. Also, was that a fucking Haiku? It was, wasn't it? Scoundrel.

Put your finger up your bum

if you're gay it will make you come

Chase Twichell wrote 'Erotic Energy,' which is the truest expression of what it is to experience the end of girlhood that I have ever read. I apologise if I screw up the formatting here.

Don't tell me we're not like plants,

sending out a shoot when we need to,

or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.

Come to me but only when I say,

that's how plants announce

the rules of propagation.

Even children know this. You can

see them imitating all the moves

with their bright plastic toys.

So that, years later, at the moment

the girl's body finally says yes

to the end of childhood,

a green pail with an orange shovel

will appear in her mind like a tropical

blossom she has never seen before.

Goddamnit I screwed up the formatting.

oh FFS r42 no one on here gives a fuck about girlhood

In 2 other threads people are being exceptionally nice to me, R44. You have rebalanced the DL universe.

I enjoyed "DMZ Colony" by Don Mee Choi a lot.

R37 Like every other art in the U.S., wealthy have colonized it and jealously guard it like little golems. That's why we have so many poets and most of them are hot garbage.

[quote] so many poets and most of them are hot garbage.

Are you talking about me? Gazed-upon but unread.

Reginald Dwayne Betts. Inner city Baltimore. In prison for car jacking at 16. Became a poet. Got out. Went to Yale Law School. Became editor of NY Times poetry mag. A free thinker.

Temptation of the Rope

The link between us all is tragedy, & these so many years later, I am thinking about him,

all of twenty & gay & more free than any of us might ever be,

& this is one way of telling the story, another one is aphorism or threat: blood on my knife or blood on my dick,

which is to say that surviving that young & beautiful and willing to walk every day as if wearing sequins meant believing that there is always something worth risking doom.

There is no reason for me to think of him now, especially with the football player’s hanging body eclipsing another prison cell,

except, maybe the kid whose name I can’t remember but walk I can, had mastered something the dead man’s singing legs could never,

how not to abandon the body’s weight, & how to make the body expand, to balloon, to keep becoming, until even the danger could not swallow you.

One day I watched him, full of fear for my own fragility & wondered how he dared own so much of himself, openly.

For all I know every minute in those cells was safe for the kid whose name I cannot recall.

But how can a man ever be safe like that, when you are so beautiful the straight ones believe it & want to talk to you as if they love you

and want you to dare them to believe some things in this world must be far too lovely to ever be broken.

R5, he's my favorite, too. He inspired one of the best moments in the Simpsons, in the episode where Bart sells his soul for a comic book:

Gorgeous Ross Gay. From his "Poem of Unabashed Gratitude"

jutting its beak, turning a circle, and flashing, again, the ruddy bombast of its breast

by which I knew upon waking it was telling me in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones, the whole rusty brass band of gratitude not quite dormant in my belly— it said so in a human voice, “Bellow forth”— and who among us could ignore such odd and precise counsel?

Poetry and short stories as popular genres really suffered from the fall of the magazine era, much in the same way that pop music suffered when radio stations switched to all talk formats.

Poetry is dead.

It died with TS Eliot (who was a childless virgin).

The Wasteland is overrated.

Jewel had the last great collection of poetry.

[quote] The Wasteland is overrated.

And it's overlong.

It turns into porridge even when read by the spellbinding voice of Alec Guinness.

This video provides little chapter headings so I can inform you that 'Little Gidding' starts about the 39 th minute. And that about the 44th minute we have a scary dramatic episode (done in a Semite voice) calling 'What are you here?'.

[R34] "Her father Greg Lockwood found religion while serving as a seaman on a nuclear submarine in the Cold War. His conversion first led him to the Lutheran Church, then to its ministry, and finally to Roman Catholicism. In 1984, he asked ordination as a married Catholic priest from then St. Louis Archbishop John May under a special pastoral provision issued by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Lockwood therefore had the unique experience of growing up in a Catholic rectory, with a priest for a father."

Wow, i have never read poems like those from Patricia Lockwood. Here is part of her poem about Trump's inauguration...

".... A brazen desire to deflate the turtle, to surprise him to the point of squealing, to pop the lenses out so he couldn’t find his way to school.

To rip the suit off stitch by stitch and burn it in one of those cans that homeless people and gang members are always warming their hands over. In the movies.

Where do you buy baseball bats, I asked.

Is there a store that sells only the [italic]red[/italic] spray paint.

The secretary of education came on, I saw her clinging to an oversized novelty pencil as she went over Niagara Falls. I had somehow engineered this, through my cleverness.

The attorney general came on and I thought I will aim the ray and shrink you down and put you in a model train scenario. In a hat with blue stripes, which will be your hell.

The former governor of Arkansas came on, I thought I will sit on you like a fart cushion until you have bllbbted your last bbblpptdt.

The White House chief strategist came on the screen, I said [italic]I will feed you pieces of nazi memorabilia one by one until you start to gurgle. I want them to find you wearing Eva Braun’s bra.[/italic]

The second in command appeared, and I thought, what I do to you, they will name it the Indiana...."

^ that poem; too long.

[quote] Are you a fan of poetry?

I'll start being a a fan of poetry when poetry gives me something fan-worthy.

Sappho.

R28 those poets suck compared to Dr Fucks.

Great thread.... although it's a little like "Are you a fan of air?"

Kudos to the Wislawa Szymborska mention. I'm not a big fan of poetry in translation (i.e Neruda in Spanish is not Neruda in English) but, although I don't know Polish at all... She comes through loud and clear and will sear your soul with her clarity.

I'd like to mention a minor dead poet of this century, Maz Ritvo. He kind of made a career of dying. Riveting is difficult. My favorite of the last decade or so.

Also, now in my dotage, I am free. There are great poets I can now say... they are turgid, hard to read, ugly song:

Robert Lowell W.S. Merwin Adrienne Rich John Ashberry

There. I am free. No need to pretend I like them.

I enjoy the works of Mark Doty, gay poet.

R58 You just took me on quite the journey. I read that and assumed it was satire- really well written, hilarious satire. Exciting! I wanted more.

I Googled Patricia Lockwood, only to find out she's a real person and has gifted the world such gems as "Priestdaddy" and "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals." She writes for the fucking London Review of Books.

That poem sucks and she's a shitty writer. How does she have a career?

Oh, and may all the Gods and Goddesses receive the burning soul of Robert Bly.

Before she won Academy Awards and Tony's and dedicated her life to curing breast cancer, Suzanne Somers was a poet of great promise and considerable renown.

[quote] Patricia Lockwood … writes for the fucking London Review of Books.

Does she require foul language in her poetry?

I enjoy haiku

Its structure is quite pleasant

Haiku is the best

it's all about the red wheelbarrow

R68 Probably zest it up a bit.

I want to sharpen a pencil in his face. Pop it like a balloon full of bile and woe and misery. Make it rain, rain on his parade.

Where do you buy balloons, I asked. Do they float without helium in day care centers and old folks' homes.

He makes me so sad, the orange man, orange man bad.

Badman orange, not a man but a beast.

I pause. I ponder. Does he know my dad is a priest?

Poetry takes too long.

Poetry requires effort.

Poetry is dead.

Reading poetry aloud everyday is great for breathing, relaxation and verbal acuity. It's a wonderful discovery even if you judge the poem - you are reading and travelling an unknown path. It's a good exercise in emotion and concentration, always a new cadence and language. You might discover other worlds or see your own heart.

R48

Dylan sucks.

Dylan blows.

How that got published

only Dylan knows.

[quote] Are you a fan of poetry?

I will make myself a fan of poetry when poetry makes itself a fan of me!

POETRY...... IS DEAD... TO ME...

Poetry is dead to everybody except to the maudlin and the solitary.

Another vote for Louise Gluck and one for Philip Larkin.

Ah, well for me nothing can top Fern Hill or anything else by Dylan Thomas.

[quote] Fern Hill

Is that a home for the incurable?

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had, and add some new ones, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style frocks and coats,

Who half the time were soppy stern, and half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.

THIS BE THE VERSE by Philip Larkin.

Poetry excludes.

Coastal shelves need to discussed in Youtube instructional videos rather than Philip's hateful verse.

Poetry should exclude. Inclusion is for popular entertainments.

R19. No evidence to support the assertion that Moore was lesbian (she may have been asexual and almost certainly died a virgin). Her mother, on the other hand, was in a Boston marriage while Moore and her brother were growing up.

R86... well, no photographic record of sapphic sex, but she was in love with her mother and with Elizabeth Bishop at the least.

Burying The Cat

You write to say you love me, to say

I loved you; to tell me that even now

If I called your name you would come back;

to say you are empty, to say you want me,

that I want you-which is all true.

But, tonight, I am a grave digger,

filling a small black hole with leaves,

with leaf-mold, with my cat, who is cold.

If I answered your letter I would say

To you that limitless love sets limits;

that though I miss your mouth on mine,

This emptiness in which I find myself is

filling and good, that I am satisfied

In the way that a cat is satisfied

with its own solitude. I would tell you

that this grave I here fill is not the

ultimate black hole, but it is a cradle,

cat-size, a bed; that the stone I lay

at its head says I am not forgetful,

That love lives on. I would remind you

Of what you already know, that grief

Is real and must be suffered, that wish

and deed are not the same. I would say

I want you – and will not call your name.

Margaret Cardea Black

I have come to claim Marilyn Monroe’s body

for the sake of my own

dig it up

hand it over

cram it in this paper sack

hubba hubba hubba

Look at those luscious long brown bones

that wide and crusty pelvis

ha ha

oh she wanted so much to be serious

but she’ll never stop smiling now

has she lost her mind

Marilyn be serious

they’re taking your picture

And they’re taking the pictures of

eight young women in New York City

who murdered themselves for being pretty

by the same method as you

the very next day after you

I have claimed their bodies too

they smile up out of my paper sack

like brainless Cinderellas

the reporters are furious

they are asking me questions

what right does a woman have to Marilyn Monroe’s body?

and what am I doing for lunch?

ha ha they think I mean to eat you

their teeth are lurid and they want to pose me

leaning on the shovel, nude

don’t squint

but when one of the reporters comes too close

I beat him

bust his camera with your long smooth thigh

and with your lovely knuckle bone

I break his eye

Long ago you wanted to write poems

Be serious, Marilyn

I am going to take you in this paper sack

around the world, and

write on it: —the poems of Marilyn Monroe—

Dedicated to all princes,

the male poets who were so sorry to see you go,

before they had a crack at you.

They wept for you

and also they wanted to stuff you while

you still had a little meat left in useful places

but they were too slow.

Now I shall take them my paper sack

and we shall act out a poem together:

“How would you like to see Marilyn Monroe,

in action, smiling, and without her clothes?”

We shall wait long enough to see them make familiar faces

and then I shall beat them with your skull.

hubba. hubba. hubba. hubba. hubba.

Marilyn be serious

today I have come to claim your body for my own

It’s the strangest and saddest thing—as a teen I adored poetry, couldn’t get enough. And I mean all kinds, from ancient to contemporary. I was known to my schoolmates as the poetry obsessive. Then, after some awful prescription medication which aggravated an underlying and undetected health condition I didn’t know and caused me a massive psychological breakdown, I lost my liking for it altogether. I have barely read or listened to a single one since, and I struggle to enjoy it at all.

To this day, I don’t know whether it’s because I associate poetry with my former healthier and happier life and therefore find it too traumatic to enjoy, or whether my brain has sustained physical damage that renders any appreciation of poetry hard. It’s been difficult to come to terms with.

Naming It by Leontia Flynn

Five years out of school and preachy

with booklearning, it is good to be discovered

as a marauding child.

To think the gloomiest most baffled

misadventures might lead so suddenly

to a clearing - as when a friend

taking me to her well-stocked fridge says:

look

this is an avocado and this

is an aubergine.

“The Wasteland” may be too long, but “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” are wonderful…

I would like all things to be free of me,

Never to murder the days with presupposition,

Never to feel they suffer the imposition

Of having to be this or that. How easy

It is to maim the moment

With expectation, to force it to define

Itself. Beyond all that I am, the sun

Scatters its light as though by accident.

The fox eats its own leg in the trap

To go free. As it limps through the grass

The earth itself appears to bleed.

When the morning light comes up

Who knows what suffering midnight was?

Proof is what I do not need.

R87. She LIVED her mother and EB, but it’s stretching to say she was IN love with them. She had similarly strong feelings for her brother, WC Williams and Ezra Pound. At Bryn Mawr she had schoolgirl crush on Peggy James (Henry’s niece), but kind of thing was hardly unique to the daughters of Bilitis. She had close lesbian friends (like Bryher), but the most recent biographies simply don’t indicate she ever had sex or was conscious of (or at least spike with intimates) of anything sexual. Her libido May have been directed towards poetry. Brilliant, dazzling poetry—but she may have been emotionally undeveloped. Her mother seems to have been a tyrant—her brother’s wife avoided contact as much as she could with Mrs. Moore and, to a lesser extent, Marianne.

Frank O'Hara can't be beat for 1950's gay poetry:

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

LOVED not lived!!! Why does autocorrect insist of changing lovely to lively and loved to lived???

R92 Haunting. "Liminal spaces" are a big meme right now, I can't think of a better capture of that in-between feeling.

Shall never forgive Eliot for the execrable poems about cats.

Also, he was a waffling arcane bore.

R98 Yeah, but liminal spaces... so hot right now.

Just don't get Eliot going on about the Jews.

A lustreless protrusive eye stares from the protozoic slime at a Canaletto. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. Money in furs. The boatman smiles.

R95 You do say, huh?

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

Howard Moss was a very good poet, seemingly little appreciated now, after his death in 1987. If you like Auden or Merrill, you'll likely appreciate his poems. His work is formal, and condensed, terse even, urban and highly sophisticated. He had been the poetry editor of the NYRB. He died unexpectedly at 65. His book of short humorous pieces, called "Instant Lives," is one of the very funniest books I know of, the kind of thing that can make you fall on the floor laughing.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Ginsburg is also fun. I'll take either Ginsburg or O'Hara any day.

No. It was mostly for the tall lesbian types who couldn’t get dates.

Poetry is in a sad state. No one seems to do much more than report their life now- it's there undigested on the page. There is more love for lived experience than there is for language, shape or form. Even the wildest of the confessional poets had enough classical understanding to know when to break, blow and burn it. The personal poet can be universally profound or just beautifully understood. Lately it's just hard to pronounce.

New poetry like new music will surprise us and capture me less than one time out of a hundred. We try to finish it. Not sure why.

There is a glut of terrible poetry - that is not poetry at all to me. An unkind reportage of language and experience so personal and unformed that it resonates not at all. It probably reflects the times. Our cultural shift is a great divide. A tower of Babylon. Everything is so specific and testimonial - already dead on the page.

[quote] Poetry is in a sad state. No one seems to do much more than report their life now

Yes, they are 'contemplating their own navel'.

Other people's navels holds no interest for me.

This is today's Poem of The Day from Poetry.Org. A good example of what I tried say in my clumsy post @ R107.

The cat releases his urine on

your side of the bed

where it neatly

pools in the indention

you nightly rest your head

How am I to infer this male urine?

A stream of (un)consciousness?

Relief(-lease) to my neuroses?

A psychoanalytical sweet caress?

The cat releases his yearning

on my side of the bed

Westernized tentacles of Thought

Colon(-ized) instinctual urges

s(M)other the Matriarch’s head

My dynamic unconscious reaches

to strangle the cat, my past life

extends a hand to stroke fixations,

relief with each sleek touch

The cat (wise old man) releases his Jungian

approach, vicissitudes flood my bed-

lam. The body politic morphs, treaty lines

blackened with cedar charcoal. Your

Urban Indian complex(ations), fix(you)ations thunder and split

lightning

awakens

oppressed

id

cathars(eizing)

soles

limbs

head

R107 They get taught to do that in their MFA classes. Upper level English classes are run like therapy sessions. Confessional poetry is the easiest form for boring, empty upper middle class college students to emulate- you don't have to know anything, or be challenged by form. These are kids who are barely able to function independently and never interact with the general population.

They anticipate that their is audience is treating their work the same way and will be fascinated with dissecting their reactions to things they saw on T.V. and obscure personal references. They get coddled, humored, and- worst of all- published.

I had a subscription to the New Yorker from 1992 until around 2015, (when I dumped it because it had gone downhill so badly). It's one of the principal publishers of new poetry in the US. I read maybe one poem a year in those magazines, because what they printed was so bad, self-involved and smarmy. Dreck is what is being churned out nowadays. It's kind of a shame.

R110

[quote]upper middle class college students

While I'll also acknowledge that "confessional poetry" is the norm, and the MFA poem is king/queen now days... it's as reflective of the general culture as poetry itself as a form of art and expression. The personal is political, etc. And that upper middle class thing... well have you actually read poetry journals in the last decade or so? Marginalized voices, increased representation, diversity ... is the gold standard now. The increased POC LGBTGIABCXYZ voices are still.... confessional: "here's the nature of my consciousness and experience"... but very far from the white upper middle class college student content you suggest. It's not a bad thing, in my view. But the MFA odor of it all is ... well, it often causes me to fast forward to the end of the poem to see if there's something more than seminar/workshop craft going on.

R112 They are upper middle class people of color and the odd scholarship student who fits right in with them. They live in the same enclaves and consume the same media. They are segregated in with the white ones.

R113 You believe what you want to believe... but the "we had no food to eat when we crossed the border" poetry contradicts you. I think the horrific (my bias) poetry-slam events of 15-20 years was foundational to it.

Is poetry fed by university-elites? Well welcome to the last 300 years.

R114 You don't want to see it, don't. Somebody got called out 🤣

[quote] Everything is so specific and testimonial - already dead on the page. Upper level English classes are run like therapy sessions. Confessional poetry is the easiest form for boring, empty upper middle class college students to emulate- you don't have to know anything, or be challenged by form.

Alright, so how does the antithesis to this go, then? How would you train and educate poets to improve their skills and broaden their literary minds? What, according to you, ought burgeoning writers to do with their time and their work to be as great as the canonised poets?

A poem like Yeats’ “The Second Coming” would never get published in this day and age, because too much symbolism and too ominous.

Well, a poem like "The Second Coming" is not going to be published today because Yeats is long-dead and isn't writing anymore. It's one of the greatest poems in English of the last couple hundred years... so yeah, that period of great Poets (Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Moore, Stevens, Williams) is ovah, ovah, ovah... and we may never see a period like it again.

So, poems like it aren't published now... and haven't been for 80 years. I'd argue that Ginsberg had the Whitman-like scope (but was too jumbled-crude for mainstream critics) - but who else has among the younger generations had the Size of those Modernist poets? Hughes? Merrill? Ashbury? Lowell? Bishop? Dove? Haas? Pinsky? no no no no.... the scope of language and perspective just simply is not longer in their zeitgeist's toolbox, compared to the Modernist Pantheon.

[quote] the scope of language and perspective just simply is not longer in their zeitgeist's toolbox, compared to the Modernist Pantheon.

Rather fatalistic to say that, isn’t it? Or at least, too reverent when it comes to the past.

Either it’s impossible to have scope and perspective in a shrinking and accelerating world such as ours, and therefore the ideal of a successful poem must change accordingly, or; it is possible to have scope and perspective as in past times, and any atrophy or neglect of such is down to a complex set of causes which current writers may have to survive before they can see beyond.

[quote] How would you train and educate poets to improve their skills and broaden their literary minds? What, according to you, ought burgeoning writers to do with their time and their work to be as great as the canonised poets?

You might as well ask about training and education for steam-train drivers or dodo-bird trainers.

There is no demand for poets any more. It is a dead profession.

People don't pay money for poetry.

R120 There are more poets now, and a greater volume of poetry, (even proportionately to the souls currently living on the planet) than ever. It's quality, not quantity nor "demand" that is at question, I think. Profession? The expansion of American post-secondary institutions in the last 100 years.... so many poets in Academia... making money.

It's the problem..... quantity if poetry and poems, and academic marketplace for poets to teach and be paid.

These are high quality problems, but problems nonetheless.

R121 is, as you’re saying, dilution and over-saturation is taking place, then surely at some point an organic benchmark and corrective quality control will arise? This tends to happen with every other vocation.

R120 people still write and perform opera. Mummers plays still go ahead. Folk magic is still used in some corners of the world. There’s even still a market for unicycles.

R122

99% of species on earth already have gone distinct. Organic corrective processes sometimes lead to The Big Darkness....

Ha... not distinct. Exactly NOT distinct. Extinct.

Extinct = Lifeless

Seems a few of the posters here are determined—-even deliriously giddy—to be living in a new Dark age.

Medieval people made memorable art, too, you know. Just saying.

I think Gluck is too facile and sentimental. There’s not enough depth for me and her imagery is meager.

R116 They need to focus on providing something of substance to their reader. They need to be writing for the benefit of the reader, and not themselves. Only academics read poems because they are fascinated by the psyche of the writer. Everyone else is looking for insight, or beauty, an articulation of truth and emotions that can't be expressed in simple language.

They won't be famous, no one cares about their identity. "I'm special, you can't grasp my depth" isn't any more valuable or meaningful coming from a child of immigrants than a great-grandchild of immigrants, from a woman than a man. You are present in your work simply by writing it, there's no need to constantly remind the reader.

They need to be taught to look outside themselves and connect with the greater world. Maybe in a classroom setting, ban self-references in their work for a while. No first person, all allusions have to be cultural instead of personal, no neologisms. Force them to practice writing for other people.

Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than a poetry slam - and I live in a vat of acid.

Are you a fan of pussy?

R130 They're actually pretty fun. You have to be able to handle pretentious people who you can't relate to, though, since they're all convinced they're the voice of the streets.

Art fart shit tit

[quote]art fart shit tit

... was once whispered quietly behind the stalls, or leaning in the ditches... now it is saved in digital server farms and spread universally to reassure the rubes. Hence, our civilization flattens, and what was once beauty, is unseen, lost, forgotten.

Happy Sunday to you R133... get some air.

R134, I’m bending over to inhale the musky odors of my crotch greedily.

R70, I too am a fan of WCW.

I love Hal Sirowitz. Self- deprecating and funny.

I like the one about the faces and the petals on a wet black bough.

With Annie gone,

whose eyes to compare

With the morning sun?

Not that I did compare,

But I do compare

Now that she's gone.

R138 Pound is a wonder. Shame about the fascism, but it’s not like he can do anything about it now.

Hearing his ‘Cathay’ read aloud in full (by Alan Davis Drake) changed my life. My favourites of his though are probably either ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin’, or ‘Exile’s Letter’—all three gorgeously atmospheric and opulent with almost panoramic scope, but also with a certain messy humanity in the way he speaks of lust and admiration and hunger for beauty or power.

[quote] Rain flakes of gold on the water/Azure and flaking silver of water,/Alcyon, Phaetona, Alcmena,/Pallor of silver, pale lustre of Latona,/By these, from the malevolence of the dew/Guard this alembic./Elain, Tireis, Allodetta,/Quiet this metal.

[quote] With head gear glittering against the cloud and sun,/The lords go forth from the court, and into far borders./They ride upon dragon-like horses,/Upon horses with headtrappings of yellow metal,/And the streets make way for their passage./Haughty their passing,/Haughty their steps as they go in to great banquets,/To high halls and curious food,/To the perfumed air and girls dancing,/To clear flutes and clear singing:/To the dance of the seventy couples;/To the mad chase through the gardens./Night and day are given over to pleasure/And they think it will last a thousand autumns./Unwearying autumns.

[quote] And what with broken wheels and so on, I won’t say it wasn’t hard going.../Over roads twisted like sheep’s guts./And I was still going, late in the year,/in the cutting wind from the north,/And thinking how little you cared for the cost.../and you caring enough to pay it./Then what a reception!/Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jewelled table;/And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning;/And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,/To the dynastic temple, with the water about it clear as blue jade,/With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,/With ripples like dragon-scales going grass-green on the water,/Pleasure lasting, with courtezans going and coming without hindrance,/With the willow-flakes falling like snow,/And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,/And the waters a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows—/Eyebrows painted green area fine sight in young moonlight,/Gracefully painted—and the girls singing back at each other,/Dancing in transparent brocade,/And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,/tossing it up under the clouds.

[quote] And once again we met, later, at the South Bridge head./And then the crowd broke up—you went north to San palace./And if you ask how I regret that parting? It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end,/confused, whirled in a tangle./What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—/There is no end of things in the heart./I call in the boy,/Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,/And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.

^^John Gould Fletcher is another fine Imagist poet, though he lacks the prestige and clout of Pound.

His ‘Irradiations’ are quite special to me.

I don't get poetry. Sure there's stuff I've enjoyed reading but I know I'm missing the essence of poetry.

That's like saying you don't "get" books or food or TV shows, R142. I say that kindly, too. I think too many people are intimidated by poetry. They think, perhaps like you, that they're missing some essence or lacking some secret knowledge or key to getting it. But you're not. Poetry is accessible to anyone. Some of it you will dislike or find difficult, but some of it will smack you right in the face (in a good way). There are certain lines of poetry that have had a greater impact than anything else I've ever read in any other form. That feeling when you read a few words and the truth of them, which you had never consciously articulated to yourself before, it so obvious it makes you laugh out loud or cry or get up and walk around the room like a zombie for a few mins, mind blown.

On this seventh day

of the seventh month, magpies

bridge in a cluster

of black and white

the Sky King crosses

to meet his Queen, time tracked

by the close-knit wheeling

of stars. I watch. You come

to me tonight, drunk on wine

and cards, nails ridged black

with opium

to ease the pain

of work. We are

all men here. Any

body can be

a bridge, little raven,

your eyes squeezed shut

but not from pain . We are

a trestle, a grade

we build together.

What matter if you say

you’d never choose

me were there

women willing

in this desert. I

chose. I choose

the memory we share

of rivers, your hair

of smoke and raw,

wet leather. A man

in another

man’s hand makes himself

tool or weapon, says

the overseer, as if a man’s use

to another is only one

of work. Pleasure

is our only chosen

future. You

are the home

I briefly make, the country

I can return to. Now

the moon wheels

its white shoulder

in the dark as you push me

to earth, slip

my whiskered tip

of hair into your mouth.

Roses are red Violets are blue OP Stinks and so do the rest of you.

R145

[quote]We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

R10 here again as I saw this thread was active again. It’s so difficult to even find anyone who cares for poetry at all, let alone find anyone who wants to debate who is good or not so this is fun for me :) I could keep listing posts I like but I think I’ll just link a poem by someone I mentioned earlier, Ben Lerner.

R147 Yeah, right? Odd to see a good conversation on poetry on social media... some Reddit threads, but Datalounge? Really?

Thom Gunn - all the right details of a gay iconic poet. I should love him. Cambridge educated... the generation w/Phillip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Stanford, Haight-Ashbury - SF and the Aids plague - mentored great poets like August Kleinzahler while be as anti-academic as you could be for teaching at Stanford and Cal. With his partner 50 years while fucking relentlessly on drugs. Died at 74 fucking in an orgy with speed, of course. He would stop. What a life story.

But his poetry is for shit. I've tried, but there is no there there. Anyone else get him, like him.... or had him?

Hell 2 the no

One bright day in the middle of the night, Two dead men got up to fight. Back-to-back they faced one another, Drew their swords and shot each other. One was blind and the other couldn't see, So they chose a dummy for a referee. A blind man went to see fair play, A dumb man went to shout "hooray!" A paralyzed donkey passing by, Kicked the blind men in the eye, Knocked him through a nine-inch wall, Into a dry ditch and drowned them all. A deaf policeman heard the noise, And went to arrest the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, Ask the blind man – he saw it too!

April is Poetry Month! I’m rereading Four Quartets.

Anne Sexton was a compelling, dark bitch.